Venturing Back Into the World
As many off you know, I've been recovering from a major knee operation for the last month and a half. I should be able to do almost everything I normally do on a day-to-day basis in a month or two and make very close to a full recovery in six months to a year. In the meantime, I'm coping with problems, enjoying rare tastes of things I took for granted before my fall and celebrating little bits of progress.
Problems: I'm halfway through week two of what will be eight weeks of Physical Therapy to get myself back on my feet after messing up a knee (torn patellar tendon). I still have to use a walker to get around and I still can't drive--can't bend my knee enough to put my foot on the pedals or even sit as a normal passenger. Almost the only places I've been since March 22 have been to the doctor's office and to physical therapy. No shopping. No getting to work. My wife drives me to physical therapy sitting in the back seat with my leg across the back seat.
The layout of our house makes life interesting. The bedroom and the main bathroom with shower are upstairs. So is my main computer with printer and scanners. Climbing the stair might be possible with enough effort and considerable risk, but I haven't done it since my fall. I've stayed in the downstairs guest bedroom and with two exceptions I've done sponge-baths rather than showers. The exceptions: My wife took me t to the "Y" twice to take advantage of their handicapped accessible showers. It felt incredibly good. The sponge-baths are better than nothing, but I'll be so glad to get back to daily showers, which hopefully isn't too far away.
Yesterday, the doctor said I can to back to work part-time next week as long as I wear a brace and only do sedentary work. The repaired tendon is still healing and only at about fifty percent of its normal strength. The doctor said it's like a cake halfway baked--with some strength but nowhere near enough to function normally and still vulnerable to pull apart if I fall. On average, a tendon repair gains strength linearly for about four months, then the rate of repair drops off with tendon strength close to normal and the last few percent of the healing come more slowly over a couple months. Bottom line: chances of tearing it again will go down quickly over the next several weeks, but I have to be careful not to push too hard as I start feeling stronger.
Progress: After a week of physical therapy I already feel a lot stronger. Being allowed to put some weight on the leg for the entire time seems to have helped a lot. Twelve years ago, when I tore the other knee the same way, I wasn't allowed to put weight on the leg at all for a month or so. That time around, I lost around four inches of circumference in the muscles right above the knee. There was very little muscle left.
This time around, with the weight-bearing, I only lost about an inch and a half in the muscles above the knee. They're much stronger, which gives me a head start on the therapy. I had also done quite a bit of weight-lifting in the weeks before my fall, so I started the process considerably stronger than I would have been normally. Overall, the major leg muscles probably aren't too much weaker than they were before I started the weight-lifting. That's great, but it means that I have to watch it so that I don't tear the tendon again.
With all that, I still have a long way to go. The big problems are range of motion, rebuilding small muscles around the knee, balance and of course the still-weak tendon. I couldn't bend the knee while it was healing, so I lost most of my range of motion. In the last week I've regained about 60-70 degrees of motion, which allows me to sit comfortably with my foot on the floor--something I took for granted before but take a great deal of pleasure in now. I'm allowed to bend the knee to 90 degrees now, but so far I physically can't do it. Still, the range of motion was probably around 10 degrees when I started working on it, so that's major progress for ten days.
The leg feels strong enough to put my full weight on it, but some of the small muscles around the knee are still weak and that means the knee isn't as stable as it needs to be for normal walking. My balance is also off, partly because of the weakened knee muscles. I'm hoping I'll be able to walk without the walker in a couple weeks, but that's a personal goal, not something the physical therapist has told me is possible, so we'll have to see.
Odd fact: I lost around thirty pounds in the fifty-plus days shortly before and after the accident, averaging a pound every other day--scary fast. Then, about ten days ago, the weight loss stopped. I haven't gained anything back, but I'm bouncing around the same weight. My guess: the painkillers caused me to lose water weight and once they were out of my system the water weight headed back toward normal, offsetting any weight-loss. Result: initially exaggerated weight loss followed by the illusion of a plateau. I've been tracking my calories and exercise on Fitbit for 69 days so far and have only gone over my target calories one time.
So how have I spent my downtime? For several weeks I was so doped up on painkillers that I mostly sat in front of the TV with a goofy smile on my face or dozed in front of the TV. I watched a lot of NCIS. I did sort out some books, papers and videos to get rid of, but that's about the only useful thing I did.
Once I got the painkillers out of my system, I spent most of my time editing a short novel. I know this isn't the way you're supposed to edit a novel, but I start out by line-editing it in chunks of 6000 to 8000 words. I do two passes, with a goal of cutting the word count by around 20% without changing the meaning significantly. I can usually reach that goal because my rough drafts are way too wordy. I finished the line-edits on the novel a couple days ago and took a few days off before tackling the next writing challenge.
I usually look at a novel scene by scene after I do the line-edits and do high-level edits then--moving scenes around, adding new scenes and deleting weak ones. Most people do high-level edits first so they don't spend time editing scenes that later get deleted. I understand the logic of editing that way, but doing the line-edits first helps me get back into the story, reduces the size of the scenes for later passes and lets me see polished version of the scenes, as good as I can make them. If they don't make the cut when I do the scene review it will be because there is something inherently wrong with the scene, not because of sloppy writing.
Problems: I'm halfway through week two of what will be eight weeks of Physical Therapy to get myself back on my feet after messing up a knee (torn patellar tendon). I still have to use a walker to get around and I still can't drive--can't bend my knee enough to put my foot on the pedals or even sit as a normal passenger. Almost the only places I've been since March 22 have been to the doctor's office and to physical therapy. No shopping. No getting to work. My wife drives me to physical therapy sitting in the back seat with my leg across the back seat.
The layout of our house makes life interesting. The bedroom and the main bathroom with shower are upstairs. So is my main computer with printer and scanners. Climbing the stair might be possible with enough effort and considerable risk, but I haven't done it since my fall. I've stayed in the downstairs guest bedroom and with two exceptions I've done sponge-baths rather than showers. The exceptions: My wife took me t to the "Y" twice to take advantage of their handicapped accessible showers. It felt incredibly good. The sponge-baths are better than nothing, but I'll be so glad to get back to daily showers, which hopefully isn't too far away.
Yesterday, the doctor said I can to back to work part-time next week as long as I wear a brace and only do sedentary work. The repaired tendon is still healing and only at about fifty percent of its normal strength. The doctor said it's like a cake halfway baked--with some strength but nowhere near enough to function normally and still vulnerable to pull apart if I fall. On average, a tendon repair gains strength linearly for about four months, then the rate of repair drops off with tendon strength close to normal and the last few percent of the healing come more slowly over a couple months. Bottom line: chances of tearing it again will go down quickly over the next several weeks, but I have to be careful not to push too hard as I start feeling stronger.
Progress: After a week of physical therapy I already feel a lot stronger. Being allowed to put some weight on the leg for the entire time seems to have helped a lot. Twelve years ago, when I tore the other knee the same way, I wasn't allowed to put weight on the leg at all for a month or so. That time around, I lost around four inches of circumference in the muscles right above the knee. There was very little muscle left.
This time around, with the weight-bearing, I only lost about an inch and a half in the muscles above the knee. They're much stronger, which gives me a head start on the therapy. I had also done quite a bit of weight-lifting in the weeks before my fall, so I started the process considerably stronger than I would have been normally. Overall, the major leg muscles probably aren't too much weaker than they were before I started the weight-lifting. That's great, but it means that I have to watch it so that I don't tear the tendon again.
With all that, I still have a long way to go. The big problems are range of motion, rebuilding small muscles around the knee, balance and of course the still-weak tendon. I couldn't bend the knee while it was healing, so I lost most of my range of motion. In the last week I've regained about 60-70 degrees of motion, which allows me to sit comfortably with my foot on the floor--something I took for granted before but take a great deal of pleasure in now. I'm allowed to bend the knee to 90 degrees now, but so far I physically can't do it. Still, the range of motion was probably around 10 degrees when I started working on it, so that's major progress for ten days.
The leg feels strong enough to put my full weight on it, but some of the small muscles around the knee are still weak and that means the knee isn't as stable as it needs to be for normal walking. My balance is also off, partly because of the weakened knee muscles. I'm hoping I'll be able to walk without the walker in a couple weeks, but that's a personal goal, not something the physical therapist has told me is possible, so we'll have to see.
Odd fact: I lost around thirty pounds in the fifty-plus days shortly before and after the accident, averaging a pound every other day--scary fast. Then, about ten days ago, the weight loss stopped. I haven't gained anything back, but I'm bouncing around the same weight. My guess: the painkillers caused me to lose water weight and once they were out of my system the water weight headed back toward normal, offsetting any weight-loss. Result: initially exaggerated weight loss followed by the illusion of a plateau. I've been tracking my calories and exercise on Fitbit for 69 days so far and have only gone over my target calories one time.
So how have I spent my downtime? For several weeks I was so doped up on painkillers that I mostly sat in front of the TV with a goofy smile on my face or dozed in front of the TV. I watched a lot of NCIS. I did sort out some books, papers and videos to get rid of, but that's about the only useful thing I did.
Once I got the painkillers out of my system, I spent most of my time editing a short novel. I know this isn't the way you're supposed to edit a novel, but I start out by line-editing it in chunks of 6000 to 8000 words. I do two passes, with a goal of cutting the word count by around 20% without changing the meaning significantly. I can usually reach that goal because my rough drafts are way too wordy. I finished the line-edits on the novel a couple days ago and took a few days off before tackling the next writing challenge.
I usually look at a novel scene by scene after I do the line-edits and do high-level edits then--moving scenes around, adding new scenes and deleting weak ones. Most people do high-level edits first so they don't spend time editing scenes that later get deleted. I understand the logic of editing that way, but doing the line-edits first helps me get back into the story, reduces the size of the scenes for later passes and lets me see polished version of the scenes, as good as I can make them. If they don't make the cut when I do the scene review it will be because there is something inherently wrong with the scene, not because of sloppy writing.