Moving House!!!!!!!!!!

Um...well...I'm moving house...Knee hurts and knackered but love the new place already! No internet for the first month though it looks like so will be rather sporadic on the post front. Hopefully the writing will continue though and you may end up with a barrage of new posts!!!

Wish me luck!

There are Good Days and Bad Days!

There have been quite a few bad days recently, the endless stream of paperwork and physio and drugs and scar massage (don't let the term massage fool you, the aim is to rip the formed scar tissue off the muscle making my leg able to bend) but today was not one of them!

Reaity is knocking, do I really have to answer?

There are many different aspects to living with the reality of a disability. There are some that you barely notice because you have been living with them for so long. Others you will never get used to. For instance knowing that there is a time delay between waking up and being able to get out of bed is normal. Knowing to make large meals because there are days when cooking becomes impossible is just a fact of life and doing roughly an hour of physio every day doesn’t seem like such a hassle when you have been doing it for 16 years.

Baths

A bath seems like a simple thing to have. It runs for a few minutes and then you have hours of stress free relaxation time. That is unless it is your first post-op bath which happens to occur after physio. The first barrier to bathing is the type of bath you have, no handles equals no bath so challenge number one is walking around the corner to my parents house where a suitable bath is waiting.

Week 7

So we have reached week 7 of the Blueprint The Gruffalo Child Reward Chart which means we are half way through (as it is being used by two people). Last week didn't go too badly, helped along by glittery new stickers (week 6 is at the top of the pic due to its refusal to be included last week!):



The goals for this week are basically the same except not being hard on myself has been replaced by going outside...

• Write something every day
• Do physio
• Read a chapter of Living Well With Pain And Illness: The mindful way to free yourself from suffering 
• Go outside every day
• Have breakfast and lunch

So looks like it's time to giving the whole going outside thing a go, wish me luck!

The Realities of Post-Op Recovery

No one ever says that the (orthopaedic) recovery period is easy, they say it’s worth it, it’s challenging, it requires dedication and it ultimately leads to a greater degree of freedom than your pre-op state. The part that people who have got to the other side seem to forget to mention is the pain, the humiliation, the isolation, the desperation and the tears. I am as guilty of this as the rest but the only person who isn’t helped is the person currently going through the recovery period who is sitting there hearing all the platitudes about how it will all be worth it in the end.

Pain Management & Mindfullness

Over the years working in a book shop I kept spotting a book called Living Well With Pain And Illness: The mindful way to free yourself from suffering and instantly dismissing it. However after my intro to pain management book list recommended it I decided to have another look as it has always sold pretty well. My main compunction being that it involved mindfulness which i automatically assumed to mean some kind of spiritual crap and meditation. Well having reached the second chapter I am fairly convinced that I'm safe from spiritual stuff but today I had to face meditation, an activity I have consistently avoided due to my inability to sit still let alone empty my mind!

Deadlocks and Drop Curbs

There is a very strange phenomenon when you are on crutches and attempt to cross a road. As a standard pedestrian you stand there at the edge of the road for three hours in the pouring rain while drivers aim at puddles to splash you. However as soon as you are on crutches (and the slower you are going the more it happens) cars automatically stop for you and let you cross. Now as a pedestrian this is a fantastic thing to happen, however as a slow moving crutch user you are acutely aware of a queue of cars about the same length as the queue on a motorway in mid-summer following an accident. This pressure makes you more and more anxious until you are attempting to use your crutches as monkey bars to swing across the road thus increasing exponentially the chance of said crutch user ending up flat on their face in the middle of the road (luckily this phenomenon occurs about five times as often within sight of a hospital.

Week 6

So week 5 was another week of struggling, largely thanks to my incision getting infected and making me want to curl up in a ball (slight problem when in a straight leg brace) and sulk!

And to add insult to infection the picture refuses to publish,maybe I'm only allowed one a day?!
(imagine pic of gruffalo chart with less than usual stickers but just enough to get a reward!)

So this weeks goals are:

• Write something everyday 
• Do physio (even though it is hellish)
• Read a chapter of Living Well With Pain And Illness: The mindful way to free yourself from suffering every day
• Not be hard on myself (hmm...)
• Have breakfast and lunch (back to being a problem again)

And in a cruel twist of setting my aims higher I have increased the number of stickers required by five :S

Three Weeks On (inc pic)

So week three arrived with the fantastic news that the evil brace is history!!!!!!!! Unfortunately this does mean physio begins :( I had the brace off Monday afternoon and went to my first physio session at midday on Tuesday. The good news is my surgeon has given me unlimited use of my knee (sounds rather like a phone or internet plan but hey!) the bad news is that my knee is not quite so on board with all this no limits stuff!

Off to the Hospital

So today is wound check day and frankly its a very good thing that it is! I currently have a broken brace which requires two people to adjust and needs to be adjusted every time I stand up-this is not ideal! The wound itself is infected and the antibiotics are not helping, in fact the infection seems to be getting worse. Finally my foot is the size of a small country. In fact it looks like one of those cartoons where they try to pump up a person and the hands and feet become balloons with tiny fingers or toes sticking out! Hopefully today will get the infection and the brace sorted (although I really would like either a smaller brace or no brace at all).

Well, we'll see, off to the hospital this afternoon and hopefully more cheerful posts to follow!

Just Stuff (pic warning for the sqeamish)

“Life is scary, get used to it, there are no magical fixes it’s up to you”
“But what if it’s too hard?”
“Nothing in this life that is worth having comes easy”

I was sitting trying to figure out what to write and from the TV that I had on for background noise I hear this conversation (why is that comedy shows have an uncanny habit of hitting nerves a lot more often than they should-stick to the funny stuff!!!).

Two Weeks On

So it will be two weeks tomorrow. Usually this would be around the time that things are beginning to feel normalish again. Unfortunately this time I have been caught up in the set-back referred to yesterday which is actually a wound infection. At least now I know why I feel sore and generally crappy and now that I have my giant blue bullet antibiotics I will be back up and running in no time!

The plan to try to wangle a range on movement brace to replace the full leg monstrosity currently holding me hostage is still on and frankly after wrangling the receptionist at the doctors today I think I have a pretty good shot! The thing with my surgery is that you can absolutely see a doctor the same day you realise something is horribly wrong with you, oh but you have to let them know between 8:30 and 9am...