Author: mriverswright

8/9/18: 8 Months P.O.

8 mo. PO this week. This month I added hills to my stamina-building walks, and suddenly feel gimpy-limpy again on those ascents. Makes me realize how normal my gait has felt for weeks on the flats.

Today in PT Melissa had me run for 20 yards down a hallway and said my gait looked great – no limp and no favoring the non-surgical side. My single-leg calf raises are steady and calves are looking strong. Woo-hoo!! I was terrified the whole time, thank you very much. Next time I’ll be able to relax more.

Any day I do too much demonstrating at work training clients (squats, deadlifts, lunges with just body weight) brings on muscle belly pain a day or two later that is deep & achy and reminds me of the pit of despair from weeks 1-13 PO, but it passes within 24 hours.

Every Sunday I look ahead at my coming week and think about how to judiciously spend what’s in my “energy bucket.” Am I training Mon & Tues morning? Probably shouldn’t do PT exercises or take my walk those days. Swimming with the kids every afternoon? Probably shouldn’t do laps or wear flippers on the days I worked in the morning or did exercises. Just sit in the water & cool off & breathe. (Challenging, since my two kids are shot out of cannons every morning, and there’s a kid in me who was once the same.)

My recovery is progressing. Could it progress faster without a highly physical job & kids? Yep. But that would be someone else’s life, and I am working hard at loving what is.

7/31/18: Bad Etiquette?

Is it gag-me-with-a-spoon icky to offer a pre-surgical Hamster my right side cut out raised toilet seat that I bought on Amazon? Bad etiquette? It’s clean & disinfected… I can offer it to my PT for her hip surgery patients, but I’m happy to ship it to a Hamster if you pay for the shipping, however that might work. I don’t know the logistics, but blahblahblah, and we’ll figure it out. I live in Massachusetts, USA.

7/25/18: The Moon

Den of Positivity, 7.5 mo PO: From a friend’s post about the moon last night: “PEOPLE. I just saw the moon in my new telescope. And I mean in crystal clear precision, so big it didn’t fit in the lens, I had to pan to see all of it, and CRYSTAL CLEAR. Like the pictures you see in books of close-ups of the moon. Craters, ridges of craters in stark relief, valleys, those shocking white spots and lines that look like meridians radiating out from craters – or maybe it was one of the moon’s poles?? How the hell do I know!! And a crystal clear Sea of Tranquility. I could see textures, people, and colors – well, ok, black and white and grey, not exactly colors but MOON colors, and they were stunning. Holy cow I am bad at that telescope and holy cow it is a steep learning curve but I hit JUST THE RIGHT spot with the focus control and it popped into perfect focus – so I learned THAT tonight, go slow with THAT knob or you miss everything, 1 millimeter in either direction and it’s a blob, but it DOES have a perfect place. If I never figure out how to see ANYTHING ELSE with that telescope, that moon is good enough! That telescope is bigger than I am and I got like a dozen new mosquito bites dragging it out to that field and it was totally worth it. That was mind-blowing.”