Wacky times at the surgeon's office

My lovely knee incision is mostly just a pretty clean red line with some flaky skin around it. I seem to have finished a hypersensitive period where everything annoyed my whole leg, but that lasted only a couple of days. But this weekend I started to wonder about a couple of spots that were different from the rest. There's a wide scabby patch right on the kneecap that just isn't healing as fast as the rest, and it keeps shedding drops of blood because one side keeps separating from the normal skin. So I sent a note to the PA asking whether this sounded like it was in the normal range, and he said to come show it to him, and I did, and it's normal, and for some reason both the PA and the surgeon who came in to confirm his onservations were in a great rollicking mood and joked around with me for a few minutes. I was a little apologetic-not apologetic about wasting their time with a non-problem, but they assured me they would rasther look at this kind of thing because incision care is the thing the whole surgery's success leans on. And then they said more silly things.

So that was a thing. So if tyou have a surgery and your incision looks weird to you, don't be afraid to drop a line to the doctor about it. I guess they'd rather look at a clean incision than not look at an infected one.

My friend Marilyn came over earlier and we wandered over to the community center to look at postal collages--that thing where a team of people serially work on each other's collages--I probably walked a mile totall maybe? A bit less? And yesterday my neighbor and I walked her granddaughter to the playground next to the soccer field, and that was probably about the same. Last Wednesday was the first time I tried that kind of distance, and it was fine, but afterwards my leg sulked for a day or two. You could call it overdoing, but maybe it was just-right-doing. I don't know. This week I guess it's not even overdoing. So tomorrow I'm going to walk to the Farmer's Market and buy some stuff. It will be well over a mile by the time I've walked around the Farmer's Market and come back. I figure I'll walk there, get a snack and sit at the chairs over there, and after a while I'll do the shopping part, then find a place to sit for a while, then walk back. I'm not a daredevil.

The whole point of doing these surgeries is so I can be a good walker again. I've never been athletic or even all that active, but I could walk all day, up and down hill, and I want that back. My stretch goal is to be able to walk down the Lost Camp trail. It's not that far (I forget--3 miles round trip?)but it is remarkably steep, and the time to go there is in chanterelle season, which is when the trail is wet and slick. So anyway what that means for me now is that I want to keep extending my walking range, but at a gentle enough rate that I don't burn out and have to start over. So I'm not actually doing all that I conceivably could. I'm trying to do just a bit more than I'm comfortable with.

Like stairs. I have demonstrated to myself that I can walk upstairs the normal way, in full steps,. taking full weight and flexion on my operated leg. But it's not actually helpful yet to do that-- my leg gets very pouty and refuses to perform at maximum in the rangfe of motion exercises afterwards. So what I'm doing instead is bringing my foot up to the next step as if I would step on it and then bringing it back to the step where my good leg is: making the knee go through the range of motion of stair climbing and not making it take the weight in that position. It takes twice as long to go up the stairs but I just got that much more range of motion exercise in.

So far the only things I plan to change when I have the other knee done are: insist on properly-fitting TED stockings--the company the hospital orders from does in fact make XL short, which will still be too long but not twelve inches too long like the regular ones: and I won;t feel like I have to be a good girl and follow the surgeon;'s directions on pain relievers. I'll use the alternating tylenol-tramadol at regular doses stratedgy from the beginning, and I'll know to taper off a wee bit earlier so I can sleep better. (still having some grand insomnia about half the nights and never sleeping a whole night, but it's not desperate seeming any more).

wednesday reading on tuesday

I reread LeGuin's The Dispossessed. This is a title that one cannot spell unless one is very lucky in grabbing Scrabble tiles, and also it is a word that it is hard to stop spelling: dissposssesssesssed. It's really fascinating to see what kind of ancient things she kept in -- slide rules, for example. But when she wrote it slide rules were the quick and easy thing for calculating and they were ubiquitous. My mother taught every kid in the neighborhood to use them.

The book is a product of its times in many ways. For a niggly little detail: it';s been a while since you could use the word "libertarian" interchangably with "anarchist."

I had forgotten a lot of the plot from just before Shevek slips his keepers, so in a way it was almost like reading it anew.  I had some quarrels with some parts, but generally I still adore it. Also I kept wondering how LeGuin keeps getting away with just plonking so much opinionated unblinking expository downright communism right there in the middle of her books. Because if she can do it...

Also, I just love Anarres. No, I don't mean I think it's the right way to run a society, I mean I love it as a setting and I appreciate its good points and I feel for the people affected by its bad points.

Also I tried reading Impostor by Valerie Freireich because it was on my shelves and I didn't remember reading it before and I thought I remembered enjoying something else of hers. I probably don't remember it because it's unreadable. The writing is fine and I'd be happy to look at something else of hers, but the story is gross, and the premise is appalling. Why is it that in all our fine imaginings of spacefaring peoples, every culture group gets to evolve and split and mutate into a jillion new things with new jargon and behaviors, but if we include a culture based on somebody's idea of what Islam is, nothing nothing nothing ever changes from the eighteenth-century stereotype of the royal harem structure? It's gotten to where if there's an Arabic name or word in the early pages of a book I am suffused with dread. If you have any suggestions for Islamic-world secular science fiction or fantasy not involving any goddamned royalty or harems let me know because boy I will need a palate cleanser even though I didn't read more than ten pages of this nonsense.