What's happened to my productivity

Some of you may have been wondering what’s happened to my productivity. No new photo test results for three months. Hardly any pictures, and none of those new. What’s going on? I had hoped to delay the story behind that until I had good news to report, but DPR’s impending demise means that this may be the end of my time in being able to communicate with all of you, so I must tell only part of my tale; the rest is yet to occur.

On January 2, I was making photographs of out-of-focus Christmas tree bulbs. I’d seen some anomalies with the Hasselblad X2D, and I got a question about what would happen with the GFX 100S. My wife asked me what I was doing, and I twisted at an awkward angle so that she could see the LCD screen on the back of the camera. I lost my balance and fell backward.

I don’t remember this, but my wife says that I was unconscious for about 20 seconds, and when I came to, I knew who I was, I knew who she was, but I didn’t know the day, the year, what country I lived in, or who was the president. She called for an ambulance. In the 40 or so minutes before it arrived, I asked the same questions over and over again, and didn’t seem to understand the answers. When the EMTs arrived, I found that I couldn’t move my left leg. They got me on the gurney and took me to the local hospital.

I spent a week in the hospital, where they ruled out stroke, seizure, and a bunch of other nasty things. My left leg remained MIA. I never got a diagnosis besides concussion, but my theory is that there was a void in my brain from when I’d had a benign tumor removed in 2015, and that space let my brain slosh (that’s a medical term) around when I hit my head, severing the neural connections between my right motor cortex and my left leg.

I transferred to a skilled nursing facility, where I spent six weeks getting occupational and physical therapy. I got some function back, but I still needed a wheelchair or a walker. At the end of my time in skilled nursing, I transferred to an independent living facility with access to the services I need.

My wife and I have decided to sell our home of almost 25 years and downsize to a life care community. I’ve rented office space that I hope to be able to turn into a photographic studio. I’ve sold my sporty sedan and bought a slow, boring Honda Odyssey with sliding electric doors that I can get a walker into and out of safely. I’ve got a battery-operated wheelchair to get around the facility where I’m staying.

And I’m doing very little photography, testing or otherwise.

I think this is the end of the line for my doing photographic field work. I’m hoping to be able to do small stuff in my new studio.

Some of you may be wondering about the Hasselblad 90mm f/2.5 XCD lens that I was supposed to be testing. It arrived a few days after I fell. At the end of February, I started to do some testing, but I can’t put it through my full battery of tests. I still can’t talk about it since it’s not generally available. I don’t think that Hasselblad will be upset if I let you all know that I think it’s quite a nice lens.

Two members of this forum, Greg Johnson, and Bob’s your uncle, have provided emotional support as I’ve gone through all this, and I thank them both.