Interesting Times
Roundup summary:
* Chance is all healed up and no longer needs to be coned or shirted or bootied. Yay! He is also bursting with energy from all of the inactivity. This becomes relevant because:
* Brad got a RSI injury to a ligament in his foot, and has been having to wear a brace and use a cane
* I broke my _own_ foot just yesterday, by falling off a foot stool. A one foot fall can be a doozy, apparently!
It really could have been worse, though; I had hopped up on the stool to grab down a stock pot, and I had a glass shelf from the fridge propped against the kitchen island for cleaning. I landed on that shelf but being good tempered glass it did not break. I also hit the kitchen island on my way down, but my arm cleverly interposed between my head full of tender brainmeats and the hard edge. So I have also messed up my hand, but not broken it, thankfully; it's just a nasty deep bruise. Instead of knocking my head in and having to go to the ER or worse, I was able to go to a much quieter urgent care clinic, and pack snacks and a book in case it was going to be a long wait. (It wasn't bad... I was there for several hours but it was quiet and there were only a few other people.)
I sent Brad out for the European style crutches that I see everyone who uses crutches long term using and that I swore I'd get if I ever had need for crutches, and I am very grateful; I am not sure I could manage the usual temp style crutches *at all* because I can barely manage these, and they're much shorter and lighter and more nimble... just great. It turns out that over a decade of being largely unable to exercise, on a body that was already very unenthusiastic about building upper body strength, means I have the tiny arm muscles of a T-Rex, except relative to my own proportions, so we are basically talking about wet noodles. So unlike Brad, I cannot get up stairs in crutches. At all. Because it requires supporting my body weight with my arms for more than "just briefly..." even going on the flat requires lots of stops for rest. There are stairs leading up to our house. I am going to be using stairs as little as possible.
I am concerned that I will get onto an exercise death spiral, losing even the limited amount of mobility I still have. Brad had trouble rehabbing from his own broken foot and he was able-bodied (other than the foot) and able to support his weight using his arms. But I've already promised to do my best when I get to the PT stage, and I will just have to gut it out. And hope I get a walking cast... that would make a big difference. But it's a spiral fracture so I'm not sure what the odds are of that... I'll find out Monday! (Doctor is not sure how I achieved a spiral fracture there... I think I may have kicked a cabinet; I know I ended up with the stool dangling from my foot.)
I can get myself to the bathroom but I can't even make myself a cup of tea, argh. Brad is bringing me a thermos of tea in the mornings so I won't dehydrate.
Other parts of me are really hurting today; they say today and tomorrow they'll hurt, but since there aren't any other breaks that should get better soon. And actually the pain killer they gave me for my foot is really helping those places, too. I'm usually suspicious of pain killers because of my idiosyncratic reactions (codeine conks me out HARD, and whatever they're using instead of novacaine at dentists now sometimes stops working on my altogether, which is awesome when you're in the middle of a filling.) But vicodin seems to work pretty well... it takes out most of the pain without taking me out too. Well enough that I was thinking "oh maybe it just doesn't hurt very much" but then this morning after waking up with it worn off, I realized that it really made a huge difference.
Since we'd also finally found a new contractor (after many woes with attempted replacements of our beloved first contractor, we had given up for a while) there are many things that are making this easier to handle... when we got him to replace the old toilets, instead of just doing a straight replacement he got us ADA-compliant toilets which are a little higher, and much easier to get off of with only one foot. (Brad was already appreciating that, and actually I was too on flareup days.) He had *just* finished dog-proofing the back yard, which was good because Chance is a beast to walk... I had been walking him after Brad got on the cane, which really tired me out even if I used the head halter, or either of us could in the back yard with him on a training lead, but simply being able to let him out the back door is amazing. Also our gas line was rusted nearly through, and a hot water heater asploded Friday, and both of those would have been pure misery without him... the contractor caught the gas line *before* it leaked and fixed it, and got to the water heater before it flooded everywhere. Also he noticed that our shower heads were set really low and that Brad is very tall and brought in extenders to raise the shower heads! Lots of nice little things like that, plus all of the long overdue maintenance on the upstairs apartment for the tenants and some major plumbing fixes to the downstairs, outdoor electric outlets, and fixing some water damage around the house. The shower we haven't used since we moved in because it was too much trouble to get it working? It's working now. :) Of course, I don't get to take showers for a while, but Brad will enjoy it.
* Chance is all healed up and no longer needs to be coned or shirted or bootied. Yay! He is also bursting with energy from all of the inactivity. This becomes relevant because:
* Brad got a RSI injury to a ligament in his foot, and has been having to wear a brace and use a cane
* I broke my _own_ foot just yesterday, by falling off a foot stool. A one foot fall can be a doozy, apparently!
It really could have been worse, though; I had hopped up on the stool to grab down a stock pot, and I had a glass shelf from the fridge propped against the kitchen island for cleaning. I landed on that shelf but being good tempered glass it did not break. I also hit the kitchen island on my way down, but my arm cleverly interposed between my head full of tender brainmeats and the hard edge. So I have also messed up my hand, but not broken it, thankfully; it's just a nasty deep bruise. Instead of knocking my head in and having to go to the ER or worse, I was able to go to a much quieter urgent care clinic, and pack snacks and a book in case it was going to be a long wait. (It wasn't bad... I was there for several hours but it was quiet and there were only a few other people.)
I sent Brad out for the European style crutches that I see everyone who uses crutches long term using and that I swore I'd get if I ever had need for crutches, and I am very grateful; I am not sure I could manage the usual temp style crutches *at all* because I can barely manage these, and they're much shorter and lighter and more nimble... just great. It turns out that over a decade of being largely unable to exercise, on a body that was already very unenthusiastic about building upper body strength, means I have the tiny arm muscles of a T-Rex, except relative to my own proportions, so we are basically talking about wet noodles. So unlike Brad, I cannot get up stairs in crutches. At all. Because it requires supporting my body weight with my arms for more than "just briefly..." even going on the flat requires lots of stops for rest. There are stairs leading up to our house. I am going to be using stairs as little as possible.
I am concerned that I will get onto an exercise death spiral, losing even the limited amount of mobility I still have. Brad had trouble rehabbing from his own broken foot and he was able-bodied (other than the foot) and able to support his weight using his arms. But I've already promised to do my best when I get to the PT stage, and I will just have to gut it out. And hope I get a walking cast... that would make a big difference. But it's a spiral fracture so I'm not sure what the odds are of that... I'll find out Monday! (Doctor is not sure how I achieved a spiral fracture there... I think I may have kicked a cabinet; I know I ended up with the stool dangling from my foot.)
I can get myself to the bathroom but I can't even make myself a cup of tea, argh. Brad is bringing me a thermos of tea in the mornings so I won't dehydrate.
Other parts of me are really hurting today; they say today and tomorrow they'll hurt, but since there aren't any other breaks that should get better soon. And actually the pain killer they gave me for my foot is really helping those places, too. I'm usually suspicious of pain killers because of my idiosyncratic reactions (codeine conks me out HARD, and whatever they're using instead of novacaine at dentists now sometimes stops working on my altogether, which is awesome when you're in the middle of a filling.) But vicodin seems to work pretty well... it takes out most of the pain without taking me out too. Well enough that I was thinking "oh maybe it just doesn't hurt very much" but then this morning after waking up with it worn off, I realized that it really made a huge difference.
Since we'd also finally found a new contractor (after many woes with attempted replacements of our beloved first contractor, we had given up for a while) there are many things that are making this easier to handle... when we got him to replace the old toilets, instead of just doing a straight replacement he got us ADA-compliant toilets which are a little higher, and much easier to get off of with only one foot. (Brad was already appreciating that, and actually I was too on flareup days.) He had *just* finished dog-proofing the back yard, which was good because Chance is a beast to walk... I had been walking him after Brad got on the cane, which really tired me out even if I used the head halter, or either of us could in the back yard with him on a training lead, but simply being able to let him out the back door is amazing. Also our gas line was rusted nearly through, and a hot water heater asploded Friday, and both of those would have been pure misery without him... the contractor caught the gas line *before* it leaked and fixed it, and got to the water heater before it flooded everywhere. Also he noticed that our shower heads were set really low and that Brad is very tall and brought in extenders to raise the shower heads! Lots of nice little things like that, plus all of the long overdue maintenance on the upstairs apartment for the tenants and some major plumbing fixes to the downstairs, outdoor electric outlets, and fixing some water damage around the house. The shower we haven't used since we moved in because it was too much trouble to get it working? It's working now. :) Of course, I don't get to take showers for a while, but Brad will enjoy it.