Category Archives: Health

Health

The Knee So Far

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Samain                                                   Moon of the Winter Solstice

Too much fun yesterday to write. Final checkup with my internist post-op. Lunch. Plus, trying to find Pokemon cards for Gabe. By lunch at the Rice and Sushi Bistro I had begun to hurt. Before the soup the pain was bad. By the time of the soup I headed out to the truck for another dilaudid. It kicked in, helped.

At home I went to bed, unloaded the knee and the rest was the evening. Now it’s morning.

This point in the process is a combination of pain and boredom. I’ve watched TV, read the sort of things I can follow-fiction, mostly, and some news, played with the dogs and talked to Kate. Still too drugged to read seriously or write. Too much pain to do much more than I did yesterday.

Yet. The knee bends much more easily. Flexion and extension are, at least to the folks who know about these things, remarkable. This is the prime directive of the moment: heal the knee. That’s happening and at a rapid pace. So they say.

Many people are back to work at this point though I would find it pretty difficult.

Later. More healing to do right now.

 

Family, Health, Shadow Mountain, Tea, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Chilly

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Samain                                              Moon of the Winter Solstice

Woke up this morning to a text from Tom Crane. He lives in the western Twin Cities’ suburb of Shorewood. It was, he said, -20. Now that’s getting chilly. Up here we started out at zero, but hit 28 later in the day. The solar snow shovel is hard at work. Yeah.

Due to my delicate condition we hired a snow plow guy, Ted. Ted moved here from Ames, Iowa, the closest town to Nevada where Kate grew up. Weird. He came early yesterday, did a great job.

I’m looking forward the next couple of weeks because I’ll begin to get up to the loft. December and January are my finishing touches months. Hang art. Make sure all bookshelves are organized. Get standard file holders for my shelves of files. Get the tea going, all things that have been waiting, I want to see them finished.

The grandkids come on the 21st, the Winter Solstice. With a short break we’ll have them through New Years. A strong family inflection to the end of the year. It feels appropriate.

Due to the pain and the drugs I’ve had less thinking time than I imagined. Not a bad thing, just a surprise. What I have had is an intense couple of weeks with my body and its limits. Being focused and present to my body has been a good thing. I probably don’t take as much of that kind of time as would be helpful.

Kate has had four days of sleeping and resting though today she ventured out shopping. Crazy, she said. She’s my beauty, my strength.

Anyhow, to all of you, happy holidays.

 

Family, Health, Jefferson County, Mountains, Park County, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Weird about the cold

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Samain                                                  Moon of the Winter Solstice

We’re in the cool zone here. Zero right now. Coloradans are weird about the cold. When the temps head toward single digits, they break out the down coats and head for the King Sooper to stock up. They do the same when there’s much snow in the forecast, too. Kate and I just shake our heads. Silly Coloradans. Spend a winter in Minnesota.

Jon went to A-basin yesterday but due to the closing of Loveland Pass he drove all the way to Fairplay, over Hoosier Pass, through Breckenridge then backroads. A long drive, but beautiful. Fair Play is the county seat of Park County, all of which is South Park. South Park inspired the adult cartoon.

I see my internist tomorrow. She wants to check out my 02 levels and my use of narcotics. Healing faster now.

From the land of high mountains, blue skies and abundant ski and bicycle racks.

Health, Politics, Weather +Climate

Snowed

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Samain                                                       Moon of the Winter Solstice

8 below here last night. Single digits all day. About ten inches of snow. Shadow Mountain under snow. Beautiful.

A friend said he’s where he was when Reagan got elected, “expecting the world to end.” Me, too. Some days. Other days I think, No. We’ve got to come together now, have to with an existential way we’ve not experienced before.

My workouts (knock on wood) are getting easier. Drugs are still necessary, but I can see an end at some point. Kate’s help has been so wonderful, compassionate, professional when needed, wifely when not.

 

Family, Health

Bandage Removed

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Samain                                                      Moon of the Winter Solstice

Over to Panorama Orthopedics H.G. today. It sits next to Earth Trek, an indoor climbing wall, and across from the difficult to read Jefferson County Courthouse. Is it a museum? A housing complex? An observatory?

Saw Becky, one of my surgeons p.a.s. She removed my acquajel bandage and I saw the glued together incision, no stitches, for the first time. It’s a ragged wound from above my knee to about 5 inches below it. It was a ritual moment, the bandage removal. It felt significant, a milestone on this journey.

We had planned some shopping, but I chose to go home, get out the ice, then go straight to bed. This was my first lengthy outing and it exhausted me.

Later we drove into Aspen Park where I signed up for physical therapy, the out patient version. Then, lunch at JJ Maddens, a so-so Italian place not far from Select Physical Therapy.

The drugged out haze seems likely to continue for a while. Buddy Mark O says it lasted a while for him, also saying, very helpfully, “It was worth it.” Right now that’s still a question mark to me. All pain and only some gain.

Looking forward to the time when the knee is not the first and last thing on my mind each day.

Family, Health, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Monitoring

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Samain                                                      Moon of the Winter Solstice

Yes, self-absorbed. It’s one of the moral hazards of serious illness or significant medical procedures. The world is about my temperature, my pain, drugs, sleep, diet, chair. Other’s agree. For a while. But there comes a point where too much attention can become a path to a different, darker place. In that place the original cause for self-absorption passes, but the demands for preference do not. I’m raising the red caution flag for myself. (ok. yes, it’s ironic I do this on a blog devoted to my thoughts and life)

It’s time I began to take on tasks again. That gentle veil of opiates is still there, so is the pain, but my understanding of what this will take is also much greater now. Time and persistence. That’s what it will take. So, I’m on that and on integrating myself back into my life.

Kate’s taking a rest day, maybe two or three. The divorce. The grandkids on weekends. My surgery. Her own arthritis. She’s a dynamo that’s slowly wound down. Needs a recharge.

The main lineaments of the divorce, the rules of disengagement you might call them, are recorded. (I think.) Given the drama and pitched battles of the past few months you could be forgiven for thinking this is the end. Really, though, it’s the beginning. Being divorced is a verb, an ongoing action and it relates to the after marriage. Ask anyone who’s negotiated what to do with a sick kid. Or, had to choose a new school for children in a shared custody arrangement. Ask anyone whose heart thumps on that first date. Ask anyone who’s self-doubt still drags a locked trunk marked: the ex.

Let the after marriage life begin! And, as my buddy Bill Schmidt suggests, let the post-surgery life begin, too.

 

Health

Oh. Ouch.

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Samain                                                Moon of the Winter Solstice

That wonderful straight down from the sky in neat rows snow is falling. Our snow cover is minimal, so it’s not the all snow, all quiet feeling, but it moves in that direction.

The pain has not subsided. It has gotten better when in bed, but up and about the ouch is significant. Looking toward the future.

Still not able to read much, frustrating. Writing hurts so bye for now.

Cooking, Family, Health

Slow

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Samain                                               Moon of the Winter Solstice

Jon came in yesterday evening, billowing chartreuse ski pants, boots with snow fresh from A-basin’s recent 18 inch snowfall. It was, he said, “Worth it.” Skiing, Jon told me long ago, is “when I feel most like who I am.” He turned 48 Saturday. His 48th year will be a significant one, moving him past a painful chapter and toward what we all hope will be a better one.

Ruth built a fire in the place: small to big, one match. She did it. She is now one-match Ruth. She also moved split logs closer to the house using her plastic toboggan. A problem with the lodgepole pine that we burn is its poor heat to weight ratio. Burns fast, not much heat, lots of resin. When the fire mitigation wood runs out, I’ll probably buy a cord or two of hard wood. We can get that, at a price, from down the hill where deciduous trees make their last stand before the Rockies.

Jon’s birthday meal was yet more steak from our Carmichael Cattle Company quarter beef. We discuss the cow from which the meat came, not every meal, but often, following our short ceremony thanking it for its life on the occasion of our first meal with its meat.

Pat, the leprechaun p.t. guy who lives down Shadow Mtn. Drive on the grounds of a 1920’s/1930’s tennis camp will be here in a few minutes for another round of exercises. My follow up with the surgeon’s p.a. is this Friday so I’m prepping for what I imagine will be a less painful phase (less, not none) of the recovery. As soon as I’m off the narcotics, I can drive.

I’ve been in a morphine, dilaudid, vicodin haze since the 1st of December. I lose track of the conversation, can’t follow sentences in books, generally feel gauzy. Less so now as Kate has me on a slow wean, a tricky balance, as I’ve said, between enough pain control to exercise, but not more than enough.

Even with an attractive goal and the knowledge that I volunteered for this, the immediacy of pain and the druggy haze dominates the moment. Hard to feel beyond.

In other organ recital news Kate is off to a rheumatologist today to see if there is more that can be done for her rheumatoid arthritis: wrists, shoulder, back, ankles. When we crossed the border into Colorado, myself with Tom Crane, Kepler, Rigel and Vega, Kate with Gertie a bit later, the entire medical services industry in Colorado joined in a chorus of that old Leonard Cohen song, Hallelujah! A major revenue source coming to stay. Welcome!

This week should see marked improvement. I’m looking forward to it.

 

 

Health, Jefferson County, Shadow Mountain

A Cottony Indistinctness

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Samain                                                      Moon of the Winter Solstice

Let me see. A salmon colored patch of sky off to the north gives romance to the stand of lodgepole pines in our backyard. I’m working on the Stickley side table we bought in early 2015 and looking north. It served as our family dining table over the last couple of years, giving way partly now to the beetlekill table we have upstairs.

Trying to find a metaphor for this stage of recovery. Walking on a path, let’s call it the ancientrail of healing, I’ve passed through a rocky, but beautiful valley. Now the weather has cooled down, the sky gone gray. I’m still moving but the pleasure in it has receded. This, I imagine, is a plateau.

Mobility and extension have both increased, but I seem stuck. The mood that accompanies this portion of the ancientrail is one with the sky and the weather, gray and cool. This will pass, yes, it will.

But. Right now. I’m in it, surrounded by its cottony indistinctness.

Family, Health

Dewebbing

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Samain                                                 Moon of the Winter Solstice

Trying to get the cobwebs woven by dilaudid and sweet lady morphine cleared out. Hard to do since I still need the dilaudid. And I do.

Still the pain in the knee. A week to go until I see the PA and they remove the bandage. Until then, at least, I’ll need the narcotics.

The insult is like somebody took a knife to my knee, cut the bone and hammered metal spikes into my tibia and femur. Then stitched it back up and hid the damage under a water tight, air permeable bandage.

Oh, wait.

Now I’m sleeping, following my nurse/doctor/wife’s recommendations, waking up and doing it again. Though. The general trajectory is up. The pain less, the meds fewer, a bit of appetite returning. By a week from today I’ll be in a much better place.