Recovering Surgery-holic

Blog!!

I apologize for taking so long to get back to you blog and/or readers, things have been predictably chaotic since the surgery and typing is still a pain as I'm mostly restricted to one hand (my left) at the moment. However, I do have that update I promised you, albeit a couple weeks later than it should be. 

Look at how happy she is to be in this sling with
her little squeezy ball! Everyone who undergoes
major shoulder surgery is THIS happy! :D ...

I am now on the other side of my seventh joint replacement surgery (I had to do my left hip twice due to a massive infection, fun times, and I did both of my ankles at the same time so you can kind of count it as one surgery. Either seven or eight surgeries/joints replaced based on how you want to count it. Your choice). I'm hoping that if I do enough of these I'll get the next one free, like one of those punchcards you get "Buy 7, get the 8th free!!", that sort of thing (Surgery Punchcards need to be a thing). Anyway, I wanted to let you all know that my surgery went well and I actually went home the very next day. The surgery took an extra hour due to the complexity of the joint issues, but the doctor says it went well and everything is looking good so far. The pain hasn't been as bad as it was with the other surgeries, but it is a bit more difficult in other aspects, such as typing, which is difficult, but at least manageable for the time being. It looks like I'll be in this highly restrictive sling (complete with squeezy ball and velcro pouch for said squeezy ball) for 6 weeks but I am able to read and do a lot of things on my own, although there are still a lot of things I need help with, but I'm trying to keep as independent as I can manage. 

I saw my doctor earlier a week ago and he thinks everything is mostly looking well, although the shoulder muscles are much tighter than usual after this kind of surgery because of how long I had the problem before I got it fixed. This means I'm probably not looking at full range of motion once I'm fully healed but I'm just shooting for some increase and no more pain, and the doctor thinks that is manageable. I've been doing more exercises to build up my strength and trying to find a good balance between progress and pain, which is somewhat frustrating but not at all unexpected. However there is improvement on a day to day basis and I'm going to go for the silver lining as I know that is always the best way to handle these these things and indeed just about anything in life. 

I haven't been able to do any writing yet but I'm going to do some experimentation on using both hands for typing soon and if I can manage that then I see no reason why I can't get back into writing again and finish my rough draft. I did manage a short writing exercise yesterday with Nick, who came over to hang out and discuss the book stuff, so that's promising progress. 

This exercise is based on a Cragslist ad under "Missed Connections"

An Apology Next to the Graveyard

Susan plopped down next to the worn down gravestone, the early morning dew dampening the underside of her jeans, cool compressed grass flattening under her thin frame. She didn’t mind the wetness, she didn’t mind anything anymore, she had gone numb from the pain. “I’m sorry I didn’t show up when I said I would,” she said to the air, a couple early birds chirping back in response. “I’m sorry that I wussed out.”

She drew her finger absently through the air, swishing through the dense fog like a lazy leaf across a pond, disturbing the tranquil surface without a thought. A couple sparks leapt off her fingertip and dissipated into nothingness. There was a faint creaking noise at her side, seemingly from beneath her, about six feet down. “I just can’t be near you and not have you forever. However long that might be for us. Could be a while, knowing you, knowing me. Do you know where I’ve been? Across the country, wandering town-to-town trying to forget, to move on. I can’t, you have me in your spell. Ironic, isn’t it?”

A muffled groan seeped up through the soil and Susan patted the unkempt patch of grass above the burial site. “ Sorry, I know you are going through a tough time right now Bartholomew. So I won’t bore you with the nonsense. When you want me all to yourself then I will show up again.” Susan pushed herself off the ground and brushed at the seat of her pants, flicking a couple attached dewdrops to the ground with their brethren. “As of now, I feel it’s only for your gain and my detriment. I know they all want to keep you, and to bring you back would just…it would be for my detriment, you understand.” She sighed and brushed a stray strand of pure white hair back from her smooth, unblemished forehead, her gray eyes glazed with unshed tears. “ It kills me to always feel like something is missing and its you. I can’t keep bleeding like this.” She pressed her hands to her chest and traced the scar under her sweater where once a heart had beat. “I just can’t. I’m so sorry. Maybe in another century Bart, but not now.”

A weight felt lifted from her chest as she left the graveyard, unspoken words of a hundred years finally let loose into the air. She would return, as she always did, but now she at least got her say and it felt good. Behind her, a faint, sad, desperate scratching noise started up for a few moments, then went silent. 

All right, that's about all, my arm's giving me a warning that I should be finishing up soon and I'm supposed to listen to it, so I will. 

I'll do updates as they're necessary for new information, but hopefully this will be a boring recovery. There's very rarely anything good about an eventful recovery. 

Ciao blog and the people who look at it with at least one eye. 

Your hobbled, temporarily one-armed creator,

Andrew

And Now, Some News!

Hi blog,

Still no hello back? Maybe someday you'll stop being so shy.

Anyways, news!

Doesn't look terribly healthy

After waiting over two weeks to get the results of my CT scans of my shoulders back, I got a call from the doctor's office on Monday (I called five times over the course of those two weeks) and the nurse actually asked me to come in just a couple hours later so the doctor could tell me what he saw. So, I went in and waited nearly an hour to see the doctor before he showed up and pulled up the images of my CT scans. (On a side note: I was told, based on the x-rays, that I would probably only be a candidate for a reverse shoulder replacement, which is the surgery of last resort and they don't like doing it on anyone over 70 because there's nothing to fall back on after it wears out in 8-10 years.) As it turns out, the scans showed that while the ball joint looked like hell, the socket of both shoulders are both relatively intact! The reason it took so long to get the results back is because my doctor wanted to confer with another surgeon up in San Francisco, and they both agreed that it's possible for them to do a partial shoulder replacement on both left and right shoulders! It's the least difficult of the surgeries, the one they would go to first, rather than the last-resort reverse replacement. A partial means that they would only replace the ball joint and leave the socket as it is. If the doctor is doing the surgery and he does the partial replacement and he doesn't like how it works, he can always switch to a total replacement (replacing both the socket and the ball) while he's still in there. This is (relatively) excellent news in terms of what kind of recovery and future I'm looking at. A partial replacement would mean that I have two more surgeries to fall back on after the first wears out. It means I won't have to hope that some new technique comes out soon like I would if I did the reverse. So, I guess I'm happy. Except...

It turns out that I won't actually be able to get my shoulder done until July 29th. Yea. Two months from now. The surgery scheduler at the doctor's office is working on finding some OR (operating room) time sooner so I don't have to wait that long, but I'm understandably concerned. Mostly because if I wait that long, I can't be sure that there won't be more damage to the joints and then I won't be able to do the partial replacement surgeries. Also, if I can get the first surgery done during the summer, recovery can happen before I go back to school in the fall and it would just make life a lot easier. Also, I despise waiting. I get too much time to think when I wait. And the pain has been getting worse in both shoulders on a nearly daily basis as well, so more waiting means more pain for longer, and quite frankly I don't really like pain all that much, so I'd rather get the surgery done as soon as possible.

My apologies for taking so long to relay this information, but hopefully you're more patient than I am dear reader and blog. I can smell the irony from here.

More news: I'm done with school for the semester (and did really well by the looks of it), so I can get back into writing again. I did a bit yesterday and it literally felt like my fingers had rusted up from misuse (despite using them constantly for typing all sorts of other things besides my book). The first 500 words or so took much longer than usual as my stiff and unresponsive fingers creaked and groaned and strained against my willpower until I managed to painstakingly put one word after another onto the electronic page. It got easier the more I wrote, and actually the whole experience was significantly less troublesome than I anticipated. Generally when I go on writing hiatuses it takes an enormous amount of effort to get back into the story, but this time I slipped back in with relative ease. I'm pleased.

I saw Nick today as well, the two of us got together and discussed a number of things regarding the books. We finished our book proposals and are now sending them out to editors and publishers to see what they think and if anyone would be interested. We also talked about how I should end my book (still not sure, since my issues are ongoing and I don't really have a very definitive stopping point on which to end on a high note), how much progress we've both made (not too much), and set goals for how much we need to get done by the next time we see each other. We also did some writing exercises and wrote for an hour. 

For the writing exercise, we wrote down a number of words and attached three other words to those, and then circled one and gave it to the other to write a five-minute short story about. My word was German. Here's what happened:

Helga and Zer Ax

Helga swung her ax and split the wood with one clean stroke. Her husband made an irritated huffing noise and shook his head. “Ja, you can choop zer vood like a man, but you vill never pass for one, for your breasts are larger than most boulders.”

Helga sighed and slammed the ax-head into the stump with barely a thought, her oxen-like muscles laughing at the pitiful ease of her task. “Ja dear hoosband, but you forget zat no vun vill care, because I can beat zem at zer arm wrestling.” She flexed her arm and a small shockwave ripped apart one wall of their meager shed. “Oopsie, sorry dear hoosband, I forget myself soomtimes.”

Yea. That's about it for now. I'll keep you updated dear blog when I find out more about the surgery dates. 

Also, I'll be going up to San Francisco next weekend to spend time with my best friend from when I was young. I'm excited, I haven't really traveled anywhere too far since I got diagnosed, and this will be the first time I've been on a plane in over ten years. I'm a little nervous, but that's far outweighed by my excitement to see my friend and also the enormous step forward it represents in my recovery.

That's all for now. TTFN.

Your Germanic Topiary (HUH???),
Andrew

Nickronicity

Hi blog,

Today Nick and I met and discussed some topics for out books. Since our stories intertwine at certain points, our main goal today was to work on finding ways of connecting our books, showing points where we either were together or nearby, or finding similar emotions or events that we both experienced but weren't necessarily in the same place when they happened. In essence, we're attempting to synchronize our books. Since I'm trying to synchronize with Nick, it has henceforth been dubbed: Nickronicity. I called them explicit and implicit events. The explicit events took place when we were together: high school, middle school, when he was doing his 3000 For the Cure project, and more recently after he came back from college. Implicit events were things like: how we felt at certain points in our lives, major historical events, important life events, and how his timeline and my own seem to either mirror each other or have opposite amplitudes (his life being great vs. me going through the worst stuff in my life).

But before we got into that, we decided to do a couple writing exercises. Nick was working on some of his stuff yesterday and had worked himself into a very good writing mood. He decided he wanted to take advantage of that and set for us a very strange writing task. As he was sipping his tea (which he had made a couple minutes before) he commented on the fact that it tasted like Fruity Pebbles. That gave him the idea for our writing exercise. "We'll write a short story on one page of paper that has to start with 'This tea tastes like Fruity Pebbles!'" His story, once he finished it, was a lot more cohesive and normal than mine. Mine...well...here it is...

This tea tastes like Fruity Pebbles!” the priest spat as he chucked the cup at the nun. The woman glowered at him before staring at the muddy-colored stain splattered across the wall behind her.

“I hope you don’t think I’ll be the one to clean that up,” she huffed irritably. “Honestly Jim, you’re such a fluffing child.”

The 436-year old priest WAS a child though. Although his aged mind was sharp as ever, his body had never grown past five years old. “And whose garnet-dwelling fault is that?” he whined.

The vampire nun rolled her sharp, crystal-blue eyes and started to pick up the mess. “Honestly Jim, thou art a boil. You should be thankful the Creator has gifted us so.”

“Easy for you to say Bev, you’ve got the body of a 16-year old maiden with the brain of Sun Tzu.” Jim walked over and helped her pick up the sharp pieces of glass. “One day we’ll fi this.”

“The cup?”

“Not the ever-preaching cup! Our curse you mutting horse. Now, where did you leave our guest?”

“Basement, same as always. Let me know when you’re hungry. I picked some fresh leeks. Go get the water boiling. We’ll have crème de screaming tortured gooseman tonight.”

“My favorite!” exclaimed Jim.

Yea...anyways. You can probably tell that I didn't have a clue what the hell I was doing. Insanity is a good bet though, for me at least. This is what happens when I don't get to write fiction for several months, the scaly weasel that lives in my head and helps me write starts to do really odd things.

Apparently there's a pangolin in my head

I'm still trying to get this blog to reach a wider audience. As much as shameless self-promotion bugs me a bit, I think it's more important that people start reading this blog in greater numbers (not at ALL biased on that). If for no other reason than to highlight some of the important tips given out during Awareness Week. So if you could share this blog with other people, post links up on your Facebook or Twitter or whatever, comment below, subscribe by email (look right), the whole works, I would be vastly grateful. I've already given you a present in the form of a short story: Relax. A preemptive gift so to speak. Thank you.

Blog, I hope you and I can reach more people, I know that's what both of us want. You like having people read you, you exhibitionist sneak, but I actually feel like sharing useful things with people (...sometimes. Other times I like talking about vampire nuns apparently) and helping them out whenever possible.

Sincerely, your caring dictator for life, Andrew