Peeking into the rock

I probably don't have to explain why I've posted less about this surgery than the last one. Nevertheless, here it is, day 10, and I feel I'd benefit from logging my observations.

I had the feeling that rehab would go a little faster this time than last, and it appears to be true. I got "graduated" from walker to cane by the physical therapist on day 7 largely because I confessed that I kept wandering off from the walker. I take the walker when I'm really, really sleepy and I don't trust my balance, but that's happened maybe twice. Nowadays I keep losing the cane because I forget I haqve it and I wander around for several minutes before I remember it.  But my stamina's still pretty low.  I can water the yard but then I want to sit down, for example.

Pain is a bit more severe some of the time (possibly because healing is faster) than last time though it is still pretty mild most of the time. However, pain management is simpler because I knew going it I was going to use tramadol instead of the big guns. Dr. Spiegel also prescribed promethazine for nausea and to enhance pain relief, but I didn't get till yesterday which was also coincidentally the first time I experienced mild nausea. I took one. No more, unless I'm gibbering and I can't sleep. It put me in a stupor for hours, which made coping with a desperately bored puppy very difficult.

I just really don't do well with sedatives, I guess.

The physical therapist (cute, young Quinn from Louisiana) also toiok me up the stairs to my bedroom. I could move in any time, but I'm waiting a couple days so it will be easier to haul things up and down before I do. I'll be wanting to pee in a bucket for a few weeks, for example (do not want to do those stairs three-four times at night when I'm taking tramadol and I'm not steady on my toes yet), which is a wee bit of a hassle every morning.

I got the staples out yesterday (yes, it hurts, but not horribly, considering) and now the incision site feels much better (though it was kind of sensitive last night during the times I was conscious).  I feel like it's easier to bend my knee, though it's not nearly all the way there. It's about ninety degrees or maybe a bit more, which I think was the same at this point as last time. I believe this knee was more damaged to begin with: we did the left one first because its function had deteriorated so much that it was my current limitation. If surgery time had come a couple-few weeks earlier or later, the right one would have been first, I think. Anyway, I saw the xray and the leg looks beautiful and straight now. And I feel it when I'm standing up. Also, on the other side, I find myself spontaneously bedning my knees to attend to things on the ground now, whereas before surgery I had to consciously tell my knees to bend. So I have to say that some improvement has been immediate.

I don't know when my left knee stopped feeling like it was encased in hard elastic a size too small, or when the numb part of the skin on the left leg shrank to two spots about the size of a silver dollar. But comparing the left and right legs reveal that those changes have taken place.

I'm finding it a little harder to focus on exercises than last time, which is probably mostly due to the distractions of other aspects of my life.  But the weight gain and loss took a similar route, starting about four pounds light than last time. Eleven pounds on in three days ion the hospital, thirteen pounds off in six days at home. This morning I was briefly four pounds lighter than I was the day of surgery: but I think that's a spurious reading.

On another front, I made a cup and a half of fig-apple jam this morning, and started both quince paste and apple butter. I'll continue those in the oven later when I roast the game hens on beds of vegetables for soup, and bake banana bread with those overly-sweet aplets cut into them to serve the function of raisins. 

I have been going to all kinds of medical people several times a week for the last month trying to figure out what's wrong with my legs.  Got to the orthopedic surgeon's today -- the answer is: there is no cartilage whatever in my knees. Either of them. Nothing to be done but replace them altogether. 

"I know you have a high pain threshold if you have been working on the floor all this time with that going on," the doctor said.

So I'm looking at six months or so of no work (because first one knee and then the other, and my work is knee-punishing for a healthy person) -- and very low disability payments, I guess (because they're based on wages and I have low wages)-- and tons of rehabilitation and of course a passel of medical expenses.

Time to finish a bunch of projects, and maybe find some side work I can do at home, not that that's ever been very successful for me before.

On another front: a yearling baby said my name for the first time yesterday.

edit: on yet another front, it is raining.  It is only the fifth! of September! and it is already raining.  Not buckets, but a Real Rain. that is remarkable, hereabouts.

So you've got a block of buildings with an open space in the middle. It might be buildings from the Middle Ages that just survived till the present day, or it might be ones from later on, but you have the same thing, tenements (or rowhouses or apartments, whatever) all tightly closed around a space in the middle.  In back of all those buildings, whatever direction you come from.  What do you call that space?

I've been calling it the yard, though in my brief European forays I do not seem to have noticed that anybody in particular seems to think of it as their yard. When I was in Prague I didn't visit any apartments in a block like that, I just passed by them, and I could rarely see through the passageways into the (yards).  The passageways clearly went right through the buildings to the back, but they were usually closed off by gates.  The few yards I could see looked kind of underutilized: not landscaped, but not full of either stuff people were using or garbage either.  I saw a couple of trees, but they looked like weed trees. 


For that matter, what do you call a block like that?  Sometimes it looks like the whole thing is one thing, other times they are obviously not.  And what do you call those passageways?

I did get to visit a very pleasant Soviet-era apartment building (panalok), and an apartment carved out of a neo-baroque former film studio, and a dormitory(kolej) in  a former Soviet-era motel.  So I have seen what some of the cheap housing in Prague looks like, but not all of it.

On another front, I had my last physical therapy of this run (and no doubt I will have more of them in the future), and while I took today off work as a preemptive move, I did not stay up all night with pain after the deep tissue massage.  Rather, I woke up now and then to a highly annoying but by no means unbearable single point of pain.  Win!

So I am utterly cheating on nano: I've already spent a month on a detailed outline and I will spend October on it too. As I go along I am making research notes, and I intend to do that research before November also. I have a file with bits of information I might need to peruse later, and the outline is peppered with questions.

Notes like: PONIES
NEED FIRE (That's a noun phrase, not a verb phrase)
MILITARY TELEGRAPHY
19th CENTURY MILITARY ORGANIZATION (get the silliest version for the Empire)
MILITARY TECHNOLOGY MORE OR LESS OBSOLETE BY 1900
STUDENT SOCIETIES
COMMENSALISM AND SYMBIOSIS IN MOSSES
AMPHETAMINE HISTORY (but I can't remember why I wanted to know this)

I've been reading about 17th-20th century Central European history almost kind of randomly, hopping around as an enticing reference comes up. Why, since it is a fantasy set in a place that is not turn-of-the-19th-20th-century Europe? Because the best foundation for fantasy is reality. And the real history and politics and economics and anthropological stuff of the real word has solved several story problems for me already, including ones I didn't know I had. Also, fun.

On another front, I'm actually getting better vis-a-vis my legs, even though there is clearly some underlying damage to the joints. I believe this is because there is a component to the problem that is strained back muscles pressing on nerves. I think that either my old back exercises are not relevant here, or I've forgotten how to do them right, because I think I made the situation worse this summer when I was doing them. I have decided to end the practice of lifting babies over the sink to wash their hands for meals: I'm bringing them washcloths to the table instead. That's because I was pretty much all better one morning and in agony by afternoon one day and thinking back over the day it was that that stood out most clearly. I will have medical insurance on November 1st and I am sooo going to the doctor. For that, and the weird toenails, and finetuning the medication, especially the asthma medication and the pain management stuff.

On yet another front, I have a young friend moving in for a couple of months in exchange for working on the house. Now if only I would start working on the house too . . .