So, everyone is asking about it, I've told the story 1,000 times.. might as well get it down in a blog.

It all started Saturday when we somehow forgot to eat more than 2 slices of pizza, walked all over Chicago, then partied. All of that combined... turned out to be a really solid recipe for low-blood sugar, which is no stranger to me and my family. My dad is hypoglycemic, and I'm pretty sure this has been passed down to my sister and I.

I've passed out a few other times due to low blood sugar. The last time was my freshman year in college. We were doing these crazy exercises in my morning acting class. I put my arms above my head, and passed right out. Luckily that time though, there was a mirrored wall behind me. I …

So, last night was my first night of broomball. I missed the first 2 weeks due to being on vacation, so it was actually the 3rd night for most everyone else on my teams.

...yeah, that was plural - teams.

See, last year we just had our rookie half-ice team, District 5. We were decent - especially for a first year team. We ended up .500 at the end of the season. Not bad.

So at the end of the year, Team Mitsubishi (a full-ice team) had about half their team move out of town and - long story, short - half of District 5 joined their team, which was renamed to The Shams.

We didn't want to kill off District 5 so we decided to play in both leagues this year, half-ice with District 5 and full-ice with Team Shams. This would mean …

I've been meaning to write about this for quite some time. It's pretty funny to have had a hernia when you were only 16, and my experience was fairly awkward... so here's a story about my very first hernia.

So, like I said, I was 16 years old. One night I was laying in bed feeling my balls, which is nothing out of the ordinary - especially for a teenager. As I began to juggle them around I noticed 1... 2... 3... wait, 3!?! I double checked, then I triple checked, and yelled, "MOMMMM!" She came into my room and asked what was up, to which I replied, "um, I have 3 balls." "Derek! are you serious?! Let me see!" "NO, MOM! I need to go to the doctor."

So the next day I go to the doctor to find out that I had an inguinal hernia, which …

For a new hip.

So, Ninja has been acting really funny lately, like his hind legs aren't working and are hurting him. He's been having a lot of trouble getting onto furniture, getting up stairs, and even getting up off the floor. Several times lately he's tried to hop into bed and got completely denied. And even worse yet, he has to use the stairs for nearly everything - even going to the bathroom. To watch such a young/playful dog have so much trouble has been really rough to watch.

That said, last night I took Ninja to the vet, he didn't feel anything wrong in Ninja's legs, so we x-rayed. The x-rays showed that his left femur is misshaped at the hip joint which is causing Hip Dysplasia. Mixed with the size of our dog, he's …

Hmm, so I've done enough extreme activities and hurt myself enough times that I keep a couple of those wrist/ankle/knee wraps around - and today I'm wearing one, haha. Stupid wrists.

See, Zach and I were skating last night for quite a while. I was finally starting to stick a couple grinds that felt super unnatural to me before. It was going well. So well in fact, that I started hitting them with more speed. And as some of you know, when grinding, especially with torqued grinds such as royales, it's easy to let your feet slip out from under you and fall hard, thus hurting your wrist or back or whatever.

Well, this didn't happen. Although it would maybe make for a better story. Actually, i didn't fall once. I hurt my wrist …

So a couple weeks ago I saw on my sister's AIM profile that she had a link to one of her friends' journals. I checked it out, it was a kid from our hometown that was friends with my sister.

He got in a super bad car accident on Dec 30th and has been mostly unconscious in the hospital until about 3 days ago. I read the entire Journal which his family has been upkeeping and felt like a part of it. After all, any friend of a friend is a friend of mine. (crap, that sounds so much more cheesey than I want it to... but anyway, I felt I should help if I could).

I won't do the amount of pain that he and his family have gone through any justice, but.... Grahm's got a heavily fractured hip, has had some surgeries, has been on …

One time back in 2001 I decided to go snowboarding with Jason Reiter. Prior to that, besides backyard snowboarding, I had only been snowboarding on a resort once.

Some extended family of mine own a small ski resort in Illinois (Snow Star). Every year the resort would be closed on Christmas Day, however, they'd invite a bunch of family and close friends out for a Christmas potluck and day of skiing/snowboarding/sledding. So needless to say, I got pretty decent at skiing as a kid. Then I tried snowboarding one year; the resort was pretty empty so I had plenty of room to learn. Regardless, I fell a lot, my butt hurt, my head hurt, etc - That was the only time I had gone prior to the invitation to go with Jason.

So we headed up to …

So ealier this week I started having these pretty bad pains in my lower abdomen. By midweek they got really bad... Like it hurt to sit down/get up, etc. My friends and I were starting to think it was something serious with my bladder, appendix, or something. So I said that if it wasn't better by friday then I'd go to the Dr.

On friday I made an appt. When I got there they took a urine sample which all came back negative. Then the Dr had me lay down and started pushing around on my belly to find where it hurts. All of a sudden he was like, "oh wow" - which made me kinda nervous. Then he's like, "well you've got a LOT of really hard stool in here. You need to have some bowel movements and get that all out." Wtf. I just went …

When I was a kid we lived on 15 acres of land; 9 of which were wooded. We didn't have any neighbors so a typical day for me was to go explore, hunt, build forts, bike, etc.

Our woods were split into 2 sections, 10% was in the front yard and 90% was in the back. Most of my time was spent in the larger, back woods. But one day when I was in fourth grade I decided to do some playing around in the front woods. So I got my "hunting knife," which was this old 6" skinning knife, mounted it onto my belt, and went out exploring. About 10 yards after entering the woods I started to hear a bunch of buzzing from behind me. It was a swarm of yellowjackets flying out of a hole in the ground that I'd obviously stepped on without noticing. They …

A couple month's ago, my friends and I decided that it would be a good idea for Jordan to kick me in the stomach as hard as he could. It didn't seem like a bad idea because my stomach is so incredibly buff and Jordan was in martial arts which means he has good aim. So here's the video... it hurt, but everything went to plan.

Anyway, my buddy, Zach was here last weekend and was wearing my tae kwon do uniform. Since he was wearing it we decided that it was a good time for someone to kick me in the stomach again. Now, Zach hasn't had any martial arts training so I was a little nervous about his aim. Mainly, I didn't want to get kicked in the ribs and I surely didn't want to get kicked in the junk. I told him that he had to practice …

Ok, so I messed up my knee really bad grinding this "sideways kinked rail" toward the end of June. 2 weeks later I went to the Dr. to get it checked out because it still hurt real bad, and it was still really swollen. They ended up draining 20 CCs of fluid out. Then the Dr. scheduled me an appointment to get an MRI, wednesday of last week. So I went, and got the results back yesterday and they came back negative! Which means I don't have to have surgery. But they are still recommending physical therapy... So that's good news.