Getting on with things

Today is four weeks post-op for Knee #2 (nearly two months for #1). The aftermarket parts are...settling in; still stiff and creaky (the right obviously a LOT more than the left) and requiring lots more work to approach anything like normal walking.

But I can walk. It's not fast and it's not graceful - I'm still pretty stiff and tottery, particularly on the stairs - but it's doable with just a cane or even without, if I go slowly enough.

Sleep is still a huge issue which is why I'm typing this at 3am on a Friday morning. I've gotten into a weird sort of routine where I turn in about 11ish and then spend the next four to five hours just lying around. Occasionally I can sort of drift off into a doze, but seldom for more than a quarter-hour or so.

Until about 4:00 to 5:00am; then I drop into a light sleep. It's not a great sleep, it's like when you're so exhausted that you don't so much "go to sleep" as "fail to stay awake". When I wake - usually around 8:00 to 9:00 - I feel mazy and disassociated, wanting to get back to sleep but unable, but still not very "awake". As you can imagine, this shit is getting very old, and I sure wish I could do something about it.

I'm slowly beginning to re-engage with my job, with the intention to return to indoor work at the end of October. This past week I was yanked back in abruptly by a minor crisis and not happily.

I am the "Radiation Safety Officer" for my office. We have several machines - "nuclear density gauges" or "nuclear densometers" - that are used to test soil (or asphalt) density and, as the name implies, use radioactive isotopes for the measurement. Needless to say, they're expensive and have to be handled with great care; the isotopes (Cesium and Americium) are quite radioactive for the small size of the sources.

That's me in 2009 with one of them - it's the orange thing just behind me. The long black rod sticking up is the "probe"; it's all the way retracted so the source is enclosed in a little lead box with a sliding lead "shutter" on the bottom. When you use it you push the rod down into a pre-driven hole in the soil - the shutter slides out of the way - take your test, and then pull the rod back up to shield the source again.

Well...I got a call from one of our senior engineers who had been dragged out to the field because we're short-staffed. He described a litany of problems with the machine, the worst of which being that the sliding shutter that is supposed to close when the radioactive sources are in the "safe" position was jammed open.

This shutter thing is kind of a kludge. It needs to be decently clean to function, but it's used in all sorts of filthy soil materials which, unsurprisingly, will build up inside the shutter well and cake the thing and make it stick.

The solution is to remove the cover plate and remove and clean the shutter and then put everything back together again. It's a pain, but it's fairly safe (you face the bottom of the machine away from you and reach around to clean the shutter well...) if you know how to do it right.

Well...in the seven or eight weeks I've been out our two staff-level people have thoroughly trashed two of the three gauges, the worst problem being that the shutters were both jammed open with crud.

I spent a frustrating evening trying to solve the problem before deciding that standing a foot in front of an unshielded radioactive source was a fool's business. I shoved the things back in their carry boxes and sent them off to Seattle for our depot maintenance person to fix.

But I can see I need a little wall-to-wall counseling with the staff people involved. That sort of negligence - hell, they could have called me at any time and I'd have come in, knees and all, to try and clean and repair the things - is truly culpable. These aren't $1.49 gadgets from Radio Shack, but because of the staff guys' laziness now $8,000 worth of density gauges are both useless and dangerous.

How freaking hard is it to clean up your damn equipment..?

Rrrrrr.

Oh, and the other excitement is that Little Cat has started scratching herself again.

 

She was doing that when we adopted her; clawing out bits of fur and injuring herself for no reason we could see. It wasn't fleas, and we went to a vet allergist for several months, spent a shit-ton of money including this horrible "rabbot-and-pea" food that Little One hated, and got nowhere.

Well, she's at it again, so this time we went to a little kitty-cat ER and got some corticosteroids and a special flea treatment and she seems to be better. Still a goof, and very sweet and affectionate - she's our lap-kitty now that Drachma is too proud to let himself be mauled by hairless monkeys.

One last note; for some reason I got interested in a bit of history I'd pawed over and kind of tossed aside; the 1071 Battle of Manzikert; Seljuk Turks versus Byzantines for control of the Anatolian heartland. So that should be coming along here not too long.

I'll probably be back before then, though, with something.

But not I have gotta try and sleep.

G'night.

La Boîteuse

One week post-op 2, and it's about like you'd expect. I'm tired and achy, my legs hurt, and to make them "not-hurt" in the future I have to make them hurt worse now - my physical therapy involves forcing joints that are a mess of scar tissue and damaged tendons and tendon sheaths to move through that damaged material, which, obviously, they don't want to. 

It's about as much fun as you'd think. Here's a post-exercise icing session to give you an idea.

Anyway, they're coming along. More slowly than I'd like, but not as slowly as possible, so things cold be worse.

So that's what I'm doing; resting, exercising, resting again, reading, watching television. I'm still in the post-op "not feeling well" phase, so my appetite is poor and I'm too shaky to do much cooking, so I'm kind of at the mercy of my Bride ("If you wait long enough they'll just eat cereal...") so the mess hall has been kind of...iffy.

You'd think this would be opportune for binging TV series, and it is. The weird part of that is the only things I've found to binge are a couple of wuxia series (well, one wuxia and one wuxia-adjacent-sorta show). My favorite is something called My Heroic Husband, a 2019 production from the PRC.

It's pure fluff; a romantic comedy set in some sort of generic medieval-Chinese period. Our hero, the husband of the title, gets time-swapped into the body of a "matrilocal" marriage victim - apparently this means that the husband, instead of being properly Confucian and patriarchal, is a sort of trophy-husband to a more socially powerful wife.

Our boy Ning Yi awakes to find that his knowledge of the 20th Century is intact but he's supposed to be an appendage to Su Ta'ner, his cloth-merchant bride. She, in turn, is vying with her male relatives (as well as her male competitors) to make the Su family store the biggest deal in Jiangning.

So the story consists of our hero using his modern business savvy to McGyver his way out of whatever trouble the various rivals try and engineer for the Su clan. Which he always does and in so doing is winning the genuine affection of his wife (who originally agrees to take him on only until she wins the family business).

The two leads have a genuinely sweet and funny chemistry, the plots are goofy and entertaining, and the heroic husband is proving to be a solid lead character.

The story is taking a much more serious turn, though. Suddenly events outside Jiangning are intruding; the state of Wu our heroes inhabit is nervously eyeing events to the north, where one of the other two major powers looks to be conquering the other. When Jing gets done with Liang it seems inevitable that it will look south hungrily, and the last episode involved some sort of tricky political gimmick where rival players at the court of Wu came looking for "tribute cloth" to send to Jing, and it looks like our gang might be tossed into politics like it or not. We'll see.

I'm all in, anyway.

Speaking of politics (and by the way of political/medical stuff...)

One thing this rehab has given me lots of time for is observing the state of our Union, and, frankly, I'm even more depressed than usual. I mean...look at this fucking idiotic thing.

Of all the fucking weapons-grade stupid ideas...the horse paste is a vermicide. COVID-19 is a respiratory pathogen. You can't fucking treat respiratory illness with a medication designed to kill intestinal worms. Period. There's no physically possible means that the one will interact with the other in any meaningful way. It's like treating a bump on the head by applying skin cream to your foot.

But this is where the GQP is now.

What's frankly terrifying is that this has gone beyond just the "own the libs" contrarianism. This is a full on cult. This is impervious to argument, debate, or reason. To paraphrase Voltaire, whoever can make you believe that a horse de-wormer can treat a respiratory pathogen can make you commit fascism.

Look at the reaction to the equally ridiculous Arizona Cyber Ninja scam.

Having proven to be nothing like an actual "audit", this joke took months and millions only to end up with what we knew almost a year ago; that the Maricopa County voting was perfectly legit and reported correctly.

You'd think that, having had about ten "recounts" by now including this nonsense that ended up in the exact same place, that everyone would throw up their hands and say "Well, okay, there it is."

No.

The wingnuts are still roaring about fraud and preparing to steal the election in 2024. The Trumpkins still insist their bloated nitwit won. Even after all the proof. Even after all the facts.

Roughly a third of the U.S. public is not going to be persuadable by any normal means that anything other than a Trump win is possible.

That's...not workable any more than using horse paste to treat COVID.

And I don't see any way to get back to sanity by somehow managing to brain-wipe that rogue 30% short of bloodshed.

Well...shit.

Anyway, I'm going to get back to my exercises and my heroic husband and try not to borrow trouble. 

I have an unpleasant suspicion that trouble will be coming along all by itself.

Knee Replacement - The Adventure Continues

This coming Friday will be both six weeks post-op left knee and surgery date for the right.

I won't kid you; I'm not looking forward to the NEXT three or four weeks. It's going to be a pain-suck mess just like the first three or four weeks post-op was, and that's assuming that everything goes as well as the first replacement.

But the alternative - living with knees that are effectively destroyed and continue to deteriorate - is worse.

The really sucky part, though, is for my Bride, who this week finally got some relief from driving me everywhere, and now is thrown back into the tied-to-the-immobile-mass-of-living-tissue that will be me for a month and a half assuming everything goes well.

We've been taking turns sleeping on the couch, since I still haven't licked the insomnia problems, though after this coming weekend she's back out there for a solid three weeks or so until the post-op pain management becomes manageable. Which means this:

Little Cat luuuurves a nice warm person to sleep on. And the couch is perfect for that. So this was 3am this morning, when - after finally dozing off - I woke to a heavy, hot, furry little body lying on my sternum.

She really is a very sweet cat. But...damn, catto, I made you a special soft fluffy cat nest so you wouldn't do this, fer crying out loud.

Well. At least it keeps my mind off this coming Friday.

Tuesday morning, 4am

 

Me: Well, the hell with it. I'm awake. You want some coffee?

Little Cat: WTF? Are you tweaking or something?

M: No, just can't sleep again. Imma make a pot of coffee. You want anything.

LC: Ragganafraggana...OK, fine. I'll take some of that "beef-like mystery meat substance" only with extra gravy this time.

M: K; coffee and mystery meat coming up.

LC: EXTRA GRAVY, goddamn it! You wake me at four, I get extra fucking gravy or imma do that thing where I bite your ankle when you walk past.

M: Not if you want extra gravy, furbag.

LC:

M:

LC:

M: OK, I'm on it. You gonna wait in the bed or come with?

LC: Oh, Christ. Fine. I'm coming. Extra gravy!

M: Careful or I'll give you that "fish and shrimp" shit instead.

LC: Ohhellno. You gotta hurry up and get off your dead ass and get back to doing the marketing. (sotto voce) That mate of yours has the taste buds of some sort of shelter dog.

M: (halfway to kitchen) I heard that! Big talk from someone who cleans her butthole with her tongue.

LC: EXTRA GRAVY! Goddamn.