• Tag Archives hip surgery

  • Whew

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                      Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    OK.  This will be last of this.  But.  Kate reminded me of her surgery on June 30th.  Which preceded preparation for and the arrival and stay of Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe followed then, as I said yesterday, by our too inclusive preparations for the Woollys. No wonder I wore out yesterday.  Let my prop it up and keep going inner coach have the day off.  Better rested and more clear-eyed today.  Ready for ancient Rome.

    These two paragraphs came my way in the last two days.  Their conjunction speaks for itself.

    “Speaking of heat, NOAA reports that June was the hottest  month in recorded history, worldwide. That is the fourth
    month in a row of record warmth for planet Earth. June also marked the 304th consecutive month “with a global temperature above the 20th century average.” The last month with below-normal temperature worldwide? February, 1985. 2010
    temperatures from January to June were the warmest ever recorded for both land and ocean temperatures, worldwide. Stay tuned.”
    Check out Paul’s blog startribune.com/pauldouglas

    (I imagine it’s photoshopped, but still…)

    Mark Odegard found this quote in a book he’s reading about walking with caribou:

    Henry Beston in the beginning of book.

    “We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of wild animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, greatly err, For the animal shall not be measured by man, In a world older and more complex than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethrern, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family GeekWorld Great Wheel Great Work Politics Weather +Climate Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Route 66

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                           Waning Strawberry Moon

    Rain beats down and Rigel whines.  We’ve had a couple of dogs with phobias about thunder.  Tira was the most problematic.  She preferred to climb through open car windows in the garage for some reason.  I still have claw marks on the Celica’s leather interior and the Tundra has scratch marks from a frenzied Tira trying to climb the gate closing off the back from the garage and getting hung up, her paws scraping on the hood and her teeth gripping the license plates.  Rigel is not that bad.  Thank god.

    Kate’s tired tonight, her muscles aching from a lot of walking and standing.  She’s pushing it, but it’s good.  The doc said no limits, so the more she works it, the faster her muscle tone will firm up and her stamina increase.  Having the hip replaced takes general anesthetic, deep tissue and bone bruising and swelling, so painful  trauma occurs from a bodily point of view, but from a psychic perspective she can tell already that it feels better, way better.

    We had our money meeting, discussing the coming of the kids and grandkids next week.  Makes me think of the trips my family used to take from Alexandria, Indiana to Oklahoma City.  Route 66 covered most of the territory, taking us, I remember, right through downtown St. Louis, a bit fearsome for small town folks.  Mom would go in to the motels, inspect their rooms and give them a passing grade or tell us to get back in the car.

    Along the way the barns had signs for Meramec Caverns.  Don’t believe I ever saw them.  Sort of the Wall Drug equivalent on Route 66.

    There were games involving license plates, 20 questions, word finds and generally gazing out the window as the Illinois, then Missouri landscape rolled by.  I still enjoy that part of traveling, sitting by the window, watching the scenery.  One of the reason I like train travel.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Dogs Family Health Memories Travel Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Changing Time

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                         Waning Strawberry Moon

    Now that Kate will be home for at least  two months, I’m shifting my going to bed and waking up time.  Got up this morning at 7am and plan to keep that up with a bedtime of around 11:00pm.  This gives me more good hours in the morning, plus it allows me to use the cool of the day for garden work.

    Kate’s walking on her own, with a good gate.  She’s so happy, I can see her float as she walks.  It makes me feel good, too.

    I went to a CVS pharmacy this morning to pick up a few things we needed.  I don’t go there often;  the combination of heat and dew point with the familiar but still not often experience lay out made me feel, for just a moment, that I had entered a Long’s pharmacy.  Long’s is familiar to those who travel to Hawai’i because its everywhere and carries a lot of stuff tourists need desperately, or feel like they do.  It was a good memory, happy it popped up.

    Well.  Went looking for a Longs photo and discovered that, guess what, CVS bought out Longs.  Sigh.

    Back to continue house cleaning, garden work for the upcoming July guests.  Not stuff I like, but, hey, it needs to be done.  At least once a year.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family Health Memories 📎and tagged

  • Kate is Home.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                            Waning Strawberry Moon

    Kate is home.  She looks amazing, walking without the characteristic roll she had developed while favoring her right hip.  We went to Lucias, site of our first date, and ate at their outdoor tables.  Kate savored the wind, the freedom and “being on this side of the windows.”  Doc Heller says 2 to 2 1/2 weeks and she should be able to walk without the walker.

    While we had a snack at Lucias, a stead stream of young singles and young couples with children came by, strolling in their neighborhood.  I realized I seldom see this many young adults.  The MIA docents are an older crowds, the Woollies, too; only the Sierra Club, of the groups I see with any regularity has a mix of youth and older adults.

    One of the younger  couples that came by was a young man in scruffy jeans like I wore at his age and a woman in a print dress, black hair done up in tufts, Goth  eye shadow and lip stick, smoking a cigarette and wearing Doc Martens.  She was not happy with the parking ticket the laid back parking meter attendant had given her only a few minutes before.

    Here’s another sign of the shift I’ve made from city boy to exurban man.  The traffic, the crowds, the heat, the buildings felt too close, too vibrant, more energy than I could inhale.  I look forward to breaking free of the urban heat island, the jockeying for position.   Never used to feel that way.  Now I like our little patch of land, the quiet here, our dogs.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family Health Humanities Minnesota Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Kate Today

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                    Waning Strawberry Moon

    Talked to Kate this morning.  She has walked a bit on her hip, not with much weight yet.  She says now that she’s exhausted.  Well, duh.  A lot better than the pain she felt on Wednesday.  She had a couple of tasks for me when we spoke this morning.  That’s the Kate I know and love.

    A bee day today and I want to get out there before it gets way hot.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Health 📎and tagged

  • Morning Update on Kate

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                               Waning Strawberry Moon

    Back from seeing a much improved Kate.  The pain has receded somewhat and she’s coherent.  Back to her old self with a gimp leg–for right now–and lots of tubes.  As I left, the nurse had begun to set up an IV for 2 units of blood.  She lost a lot, one of the possibilities in this type of surgery.  After she gets that, they’ll probably get her up for her first post-op walk.

    She says she already has noticed a positive difference with no pain shooting down to her knee.

    I took her one of the yellow Asiatic lilies from our garden.  They look cheery and there are several right outside the patio  door.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family Health 📎and tagged

  • Wind, Water, Wound + 2

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                   Waning Strawberry Moon

    Kate’s into her second post-op day, just.  I talked to her on the phone and she has dry mouth and wants lozenges.  She says her fever went up overnight, but has now gone down.  Wind, water, walking, wound, wonder-drugs is a sequence for diagnosing the likely source of an infection post-op.  Wind related fevers usually occur in the first to second day post-op and result from breathing tubes, being on a ventilator and other anesthesiology related sources.  3-5 days post-op come catheter related infections-water and especially in orthopedic patients, walking at 4-6 days.  Walking as soon as possible usually prevents the walking related fevers by eliminating the deep vein thrombosis that is their cause.

    The wound itself becomes a concern after 5-7 days.  Again, as with walking, preventive measures, like pre-surgery anti-biotics, care for the surgery site before the operation and, now, an occlusive bandage over the site all help prevent this.

    Finally, wonder drugs themselves can cause a fever in the week post-op.

    All this means is that Kate’s progressing through the post-op maze of possible problems.  She’s not worried about it and neither am I.

    Gotta go.  She needs lozenges.


    📂This entry was posted in Health 📎and tagged

  • First Day Post Op

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                             Waning Strawberry Moon

    I went into see Kate this evening.  The first day post surgery can be brutal and it is this time.  A lot of pain.  She’s a stoic and the pain went well beyond her threshold .  It was hard to see, but I talked to the nurse and they adjusted her pain meds.   I’m going to call around 10:45, near the end of Clare’s shift, Kate’s nurse.  I want to know if things have gotten any better.

    On stupid things people do:  I saw a motorcyclist riding his bike, his mobile phone pinned to his ear by his left shoulder.

    Wanted to know what was going on in the head of the older red haired woman I passed.  She was behind the wheel of a bright yellow late model Volkswagen bug with plates that read:  Manilow.

    Drove behind a new Cadillac with the license plate:  NINES.  Won it in a poker game?


    📂This entry was posted in Family Health 📎and tagged

  • Good Medical Care

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                           Waning Strawberry Moon

    Ah.  Some sleep.

    As we age, Minnesota becomes a better and better place to live.  In spite of the rigors of the winter months, the high quality medical care creates a sense of safety and security that I’m not sure I could find in other states.   With Kate I’ve been through many hospitalizations and procedures, each one handled with professionalism, leaving me more and more confident as do the results.  I’ve only had the one instance of hospital based care, the achilles repair, and it was out patient, but that one time was as the others with Kate.

    Given my perspective on this life, that is, barring some information I don’t have, this is it, having good medical care is important.  We have it here.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Health 📎and tagged

  • Kate’s Out of Surgery

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                               Waning Strawberry Moon

    Kate’s out of surgery and in recovery.  Dr. Heller said the procedure went well, “Perfect.  Just what we like!”  He’s an upbeat guy with a bald head, lots of confidence.  Better than a melancholy doc filled with self doubt.  I wouldn’t make much of a surgeon.

    Fairview hospitals seem interchangeable with Abbott-Northwestern friendly, well-laid out, competent staff, procedures that make sense.  Comforting.

    A new University Children’s Hospital is under construction and it has a poster in the elevator:  Bold, Inspiring.  There are images of Minnesota and the Twin Cities in the tunnels leading from the Gold Parking Ramp into the main campus with East and West buildings.  Surgery is on the third floor of the East Building.

    Here’s a new wrinkle.  Just when I thought parking validation was dead, the surgery lounge validates my parking.  That’s not the new wrinkle.  The new  wrinkle is that I paid for validated parking.  $6.  Unvalidated it would have been $15.  So, validation now gets me the rate I would have paid back when validation made parking free.  Hmmm.

    Anyhow, I’m gonna catch a nap since 5:00 am comes earlier in the ‘burbs.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Health 📎and tagged