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March 31, 2005
I Have Been Nominated for a Teaching Excellence Award
It's an award given to the best graduate teaching assistants in the university during an academic year. Someone thinks I'm really good at this, and that's one of the most moving things I've ever heard. I try so hard, and whether I receive the award or not, I am tremendously honored to have been recognized.
Excuse me while I go cry uncontrollably.
Posted by sally at 10:54 AM
March 30, 2005
Stitches Out Today
When the ace bandage came off, I was surprised to discover they were blue. One of them hurt like a sonovabitch when removed. I had adhered to it when healing. I was curled over my knee whimpering while the assistant removed it. Ouch. And then some.
The other one was long, and I expected 5x the pain from it, but no. It didn't hurt at all. Go figure.
I have a lot more bend in the knee than the doctor expected, and can straighten it almost all the way. My quad is weaker than he wants it to be, but I told him I have trouble doing the exercises the way they were described, so he gave me a different suggestion.
Anyhow, I came home and took a shower. Washed my leg very gently and with love and affection. I have a prescription for physical therapy now, so I'll call tomorrow and get that started. Yay! Feedback on whether I'm doing things right or not. I hate living in an information vacuum.
Posted by sally at 08:02 PM
March 29, 2005
Ah, Spring
Posted by sally at 09:14 AM
March 27, 2005
'Tis Spring
Grey, rainy day. Just exactly the sort of thing I want to see right now. The daffodils around the birch tree in front are gorgeous yellow in the misty light, and the grass is so green. A different green, however, from the leaves that are budding on the crabapple outside the kitchen window.
As near as I can tell, with some casualties in the aconite and grape hyacinths I planted in the lawn, pretty much everything I planted last year has happily survived the winter. All of the trees, shrubs and rosebushes have at least got some kind of buds on them, the daffs are blooming, as are the little irises, the crocuses and the scilla, and the tulips and irises and foxtail lillies and leeks and other bulbs are putting forth leaves too. I love spring.
I also love art, having a room of my own and being able to create a project jointly with Dave. I now have a complete desk. Before I moved to Moscow, I painted a door that Dave paid $5 for. It became my desk top, and it's been sitting on sawhorses in my office since we got here. Until yesterday. Yesterday, we finally put it on the stands Dave built for it. (I painted those too.) It's beautiful. But don't take my word for it, see for yourself.
I also took a picture of Dave with Poly. Mom sent us Easter gifts that included this chick that cheeps, but only when it's connected to your skin. It has little electrical sensors that rely on the conductivity of the body to complete the circuit. Dave's holding it, and The Boy is investigating.
Until I cropped the picture, I didn't realize how BIG Poly really has become (and remember, he's still not even a year old). At the most, he's about 10 1/2 months. Here's a picture of him taken three weeks after he came to live with us, when he was somewhere between 3 and 4 months old.
(He was sooooo little then, he was just precious. I'd forgotten how small he was.)
Posted by sally at 01:49 PM
March 25, 2005
I TOOK A SHOWER TODAY!!!
Stuck my leg in a garbage bag, poked a hole in the bottom for my foot to stick out of and taped the sucker to my leg. I could finally tolerate standing long enough to do the shower thing. So nice to feel all of me clean at once. (Well, except the leg that doesn't get washed until Wednesday night.)
And nice to be ambulatory (sort of) again as well. I have taken to wandering the house with a plastic shopping bag so I can transport things. I actually begin to feel I'm making progress.
Posted by sally at 05:23 PM | Comments (2)
March 23, 2005
So, So Much Better Today (Day 6)
Yesterday was a bad day. My leg hurt, I was worried about swelling and pain and bruising and things just sucked generally. I was beginning to wonder whether the situation would ever get better or change, and I was worried enough that I couldn't focus on working, so that was added to my list of concerns.
But then I figured out that one of the reasons my brace was rubbing on a place it shouldn't (one of the surgical incisions) was that I was wearing it too high. That adjustment alone eased a great deal of frustration and worry (and pain). And then I realized that I could ice the swelling spots (duh!) and much of that pain went away too. (I know, I know, I have two degrees and am working on a third. You'd think I'd have picked up some intelligence somewhere along the line, but apparently not.)
So today, I'm feeling much more the thing and so am getting about more. I figured out how to carry some stuff, so I can get my own frozen peas and take them back to the freezer when I'm done, thereby not having to pester Dave about that. And I've both bathed and washed my hair today. That's a big step since I previously had the stamina to do only one or the other per day.
And it's about time, because I'm attending a class this afternoon. My Not-for-Profit Arts Administration class only meets once a week, and I have to go or I'll never catch up. Besides, it's about time I got out of the house. I've been stuck here since roughly this time last Thursday when I came home from the clinic. Time to get myself moving.
One other thing helped tremendously. I got a care package from my parents. Yay. A book I haven't read, a DVD I haven't seen, a jigsaw puzzle and a book of word games. So nice. I feel loved. Thanks, Mom and Dad.
Posted by sally at 02:02 PM
March 22, 2005
No News to Report
I'm bored. Stuck in bed. Not getting much done. Ready to be well now. Anytime, really.
Posted by sally at 08:47 PM
March 21, 2005
It's the Little Things
I would like to take a moment to thank my David for taking such good care of me. Not only has he smilingly handled my every request and need, he has thought of extra things to do for me, and he has also refrained from nagging me about doing either too much or too little.
I was worried. You see, Dave doesn't suffer fools gladly, and he hates having his time wasted. I am improving by leaps and bounds, in terms of what I can do for myself, but one thing I still cannot do is carry things. (Unless between my teeth like a dog with a newspaper. I've been fetching stuff from my printer all afternoon.) So every time I'm thirsty or need my computer or some food, Dave has to stop what he's doing and help me. And he has been unceasingly cheerful about it.
I was afraid that the novelty would have palled by mid-afternoon on Friday, once I was pretty much out of danger and feeling better, and that I would get some growls or snarls. But he has been fabulous. He must actually love me.
Posted by sally at 05:11 PM
March 19, 2005
How Things Change
Suddenly the most exciting thing I can do is bathe myself. Which I did. The femoral block has worn off, and now it hurts alot to do some of the exercises. Fortunately, I had been working on keeping my knee flexible before the surgery, so I don't have as far to go as I would if I had been treating it like it was porcelain the whole time. And the new painkillers don't make me puke, so that's all to the good as well. Means I can eat, which seems necessary to the healing process.
The cats have been fabulous. Poor Katala is very lonely, since she doesn't like to come into the bedroom on her own (Quickly has kicked her butt off the bed too many times), so she hasn't been able to snuggle, but the other three have been taking shifts and cuddling a great deal.
Of course, at one point today, Poly decided to attack my foot, which was not at all helpful, but Dave found his musical cat and was able to tempt him off the bed for some roughhousing with something that didn't mind being chewed and clawed. Now he's back to being snuggly and sleepy.
As, for that matter, am I.
Posted by sally at 12:39 PM
March 18, 2005
Photos from My Convalescence
(Or as Dave called it moments ago, my encephalitis.) No pictures of the surgery here, just pictures of once I got home.
Guess which knee was rebuilt
Nurse Quickly, On Duty.
She used to sleep like this with me all the time, but had sort of stopped since we moved from Portland. It was so comforting to have her there that I fell asleep too.
Polyphemos: Physical Therapist.
He has spent much of his time today sleeping on one side or the other of my injured leg. Very sweet of him, I think.
Posted by sally at 04:39 PM | Comments (1)
And I Am Right, and You Are Right and All Is Right -- Too-looral-lay!
Out of surgery. Bored out of my skull. I have to spend 20 hours a day with my knee above my heart, to keep swelling to a minimum, so I'm doing a lot of ceiling watching. That wasn't so bad when I was taking hydrocodone, because I slept a LOT. But that made me really nauseous, so now I'm taking darvoset and am much clearer mentally.
I got to watch the surgery. I didn't think I'd want to, but whatever the anaesthesiologist (Bob) gave me to make the spinal block administration bearable took the edge off, so I watched it on a monitor over my head and chatted with Bob about lens replacement surgery vs. Lasix.
There were no meniscal tears (my meniscus is clean and pearly white), which was a good thing, but my ACL was completely shredded. I have pictures if anyone wants to see. And I don't think the surgery took more than 90 minutes. It was scheduled for 2-2 1/2 hours, so that's a really good thing, and the doctor said it was one of the best he'd done in a while. (Though my cynical husband says that he probably says that every time.)
The doctor also says my bones are nice and hard. Which is a very good thing, considering that osteoporosis runs in my mother's family.
Posted by sally at 10:17 AM
March 16, 2005
On Not Writing
I’m sitting here in the coolest coffee shop in Moscow, making a blog entry. Which means that I’m not doing the thing I’m supposed to be doing, i.e. writing the paper tentatively titled “Macbeth and the Search for Truth: An Analysis of the Theme of Equivocation in Two Versions of Shakespeare’s Play.”
Thank goodness this place exists. It’s not actually as cool as the ones owned by the reactionary, pseudo-Christian, ultra right-wing, anti-gay freakazoids who are trying to take over Moscow (not that I have any opinion about them at all), but it gets overwhelming amounts of coolness points because it’s not owned by them. Sitting here, drinking a BIG Americano and nibbling on a chocolate chip cookie, I don’t have to worry about what my money is going toward.
I’m here in the coffee shop for 2 reasons:
1) I need to get this damn paper done this week, and while I’m home I can find all sorts of little jobs to do that become so necessary when I’m trying to not write. (Though I’m not as bad as Karl who once alphabetized his entire cd collection rather than write a paper for one of our most mutually hated classes. Now that Dave is an MFA candidate in the playwriting program, he too gets to take a full year of seminar. I bet he’ll find a day when what he most needs to do is sort his socks by color and material because enduring another moment of that class will kill him.)
2) The woman who cleans our house is due sometime between 11:30 and 12:30. For those of you about to decry my lazy ascent to greatness on the backs of the abused and underpaid masses, allow me to explain. Monica is a very nice 20-something woman with a toddler and her own business. She’s local, she makes $20/hour, and working for herself at house cleaning and child care allows her to spend far more time with her daughter than if she had an office job, which wouldn’t suit her at all anyway. Plus, my allergies get so bad when I do the cleaning that I just can’t do it anymore. And then there’s the graduate school factor…
It took Dave a long, loooong time to get his socialist wife to agree to hiring a housecleaner, but this arrangement is the best choice for all of us.
However. When I am home, she talks to me non-stop. I can’t work, and she takes a lot longer to get her own work done. Don’t get me wrong, she’s really great, and I would love to hang out with her. We have similar takes on a lot of things, and besides, I think she’s really lonely. But I have got to get some work done. Once I graduate maybe (since we’ll be here for a while yet).
Okay. To work to work to work.
Posted by sally at 12:21 PM
March 15, 2005
Perfection
I had a perfect smoothie today for lunch. And the kicker is that I made it myself. Red raspberry sorbet, half a banana, organic strawberries and blackberries and orange juice, and a scoop of soy powder. It was perfect. Best smoothie I've ever had.
And then I went to the orthopedist for my pre-op appointment. I was extremely nice to the staff, including the woman who works with insurance, demonstrating that politeness and a thank you is always much more powerful than being a big, old beeatch. Now they'll be tripping over themselves to be helpful. I win.
I go under the knife on Thursday morning. Don't know the exact time yet, I'll find out tomorrow during my pre-op phone appointment with the outpatient facility. But it's scheduled, and I have brought home my post-op brace and fancy little ice water anti-swelling cuff and a prescription for painkillers and a map to the clinic and a set of exercises to begin doing immediately following the surgery to be sure I get my full range of motion back as quickly as possible.
I also have the assurance of the doctor and the surgical assistant that I will not have general anaesthesia. I'm terrified of that. With all my allergies, I worry about being put under and never coming back. Or about coming back only with great difficulty and brain damage. I told the assistant that when he read that part of the waiver to me and he then told me about the other option (which I already knew existed, thanks to my brother-in-law John who had his ACL repaired about 6 months ago). I will be getting heavy sedation (so that I don't care what happens) and an epidural. Which, of course, comes with its own set of dangers, but at least I can be pretty sure of being Sally again when it's all over with.
I had huge amounts of questions for the doctor today, a complete 180 from what the previous meetings had been like, when I needed time to think about things and to figure out what questions I actually had. We discussed hamstring vs. patellar tendons in the graft, my family history of osteoporosis (which makes the hamstring option the best for me, he says), when I can start physical therapy, and how soon I can drive (after I can do 10 unassisted leg lifts).
And then, because I had read that the hamstring tendon option has a potential side effect of weakness in that leg, I asked if, when all was said and done, I'd be able to leg press 225. I didn't say "again," which I probably should have added, because I think he thought I was kidding. You know, "Doc, will I be able to leg press 225 after the surgery?" "Of course." "Great! Because I've never been able to do that before." But I was actually leg pressing 230+ just before I came to Moscow, and I'd like to get that strength back. He looked stunned for a moment and then said that most people actually end up stronger than they were before because they are consciously working to strengthen those muscles. I'm not sure he ever figured out I was serious
I know I don't look like an athlete. But I have a great deal of strength, and I can't figure out why it always takes people by surprise.
I also wrote roughly two pages of one of my three exit papers today. I can't possibly be the only writer who doesn't expect what actually happens when I sit down and give the pen free rein. But my papers never go exactly the way I think they will.
In this instance, the paper is different right from the beginning. Oh, I have an outline that I'll follow, generally, but the first two pages were completely unexpected. I didn't realize I was going to include a short treatise on the Gunpowder Plot before embarking on the concept of Macbeth as the Great Equivocator and how that has been excised from the adaptation we're working with. But there those two pages are, and they're necessary and right now that they exist. It's very strange.
Posted by sally at 08:03 PM
March 14, 2005
Maybe I Just Misunderstood
But I don't find myself agreeing with the term "hilarious" when it comes to many, many book blurbs.
For example, I just finished The Book of the Film of the Story of My Life this weekend. I loved it. I think it's a fantastic book. I will re-read it, which is high praise indeed from me. But on the cover it is described as "A hilarious novel about coming of age--in your forties."
It's a great book, as I said. The plot is a little predictable, but sometimes you need that in a book. And the protagonist is great, dribbling out bits of information that change the entire picture of what's going on each time he admits something new. Figuring out whether he's going to figure out what's going on is a lot of fun. And while there were sections that I found ironicly tickling, and moments that I had to read to my husband because they were just funny, the book is not what I'd call "hilarious."
To me, hilarious is three clowns performing Macbeth.
Hilarious is my friend Karl clotheslining my friend John in acting class and knocking him onto his butt. Karl's clown was working with the motor anger while John's clown was working with the motor joy and John's leaping back and forth from place to place while Karl tried to find a solution to their problem was really pissing Karl off. So he stuck out his arm while John was in mid-leap and caught him in the chest. Everybody collapsed in belly laughs over that one, including John and Karl who both broke character. It's still one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
Hilarious is my husband rewriting the words to the Thin Lizzy song Little Girl in Bloom to fit the actual intent of the song while honoring the ticky-tacky rhyme scheme. As in, "Little girl in bloom, You're going to lick my big, fat schtoom." Maybe I'm completely sophomoric in my tastes, but that had me shrieking with laughter.
I wanted to be sure I was actually working from the proper definition of "hilarious," so I just now did what anyone with internet access and a brain should do. I looked it up. This is one of the two definitions on dictionary.com:
adj : marked by or causing boisterous merriment or convulsive laughter; "hilarious broad comedy"; "a screaming farce"; "uproarious stories"
That's what I thought hilarious meant. Something that makes you laugh so hard you can't stand up. So either I have an inadequate sense of humor, or the people writing these blurbs need to check their dictionaries.
Vindication.
Posted by sally at 09:19 AM
March 09, 2005
Urk
Our insurance company has decided to cover a minimum of the ACL surgery, so we're going to owe a big chunk of change. Apparently my orthopedist isn't in network.
However. My surgery is scheduled for Thursday, March 17 (during spring break), at the new outpatient surgical clinic here in town. So think good thoughts.
It's amazing to me that medicine has advanced so far that my surgery, which 10-15 years ago required slicing the whole knee open, is now a 2-2 1/2 hour outpatient procedure that will result in 1-3 teeny, teeny holes in my leg. And that there are now clinics designed specifically to cater to outpatient surgeries.
A friend of mine told me that 20 years ago or so she had a cyst removed from her finger, and that the operation was done under general anaesthesia. Five years ago, Dave had his gall bladder removed and came home that evening. How things have changed. Just in my relatively short lifespan.
Posted by sally at 07:50 AM | Comments (2)
March 02, 2005
I Have Torn My ACL
The doctor says he has no idea how I managed to do that and not do any damage to my meniscus, but such is the case. I have three massive bone bruises, some swelling, and a torn ACL. The first two will go away on their own. The ACL requires surgery. Followed by six months of physical therapy before I can do yoga or NIA or any other activity that would require either pivots or pressing from the side.
Six months from now is September. At least I should be okay by the time the OSF auditions come around. But before those, there's Macbeth and the IRT summer season to get through, combining physical therapy with roles that don't require me to dance or play hoops or do martial arts moves (or wear high heels, I suspect). And my 20-year high school reunion (no dancing for Sally at that affair).
So. I'm hoping to schedule it for the beginning of Spring Break. (Lots of college students get to go to Cancun or Mazatlan or Florida. I get to have surgery. Wheee.)
At least the doctor has okayed, even encouraged exercise between now and the surgery. In fact, he has required it. The right kind will assure that my muscles heal the way they should afterwards. And the right kind means cardio. Lots and lots of cardio. That and a little bit of strenght training for my quads.
So now I don't have to worry that the walking I've done over the past 5 weeks was doing further damage. It was actually the best choice I could have made.
I wish I hadn't made the choice to shield Maggie with my hip that day in Acting Studio, though that choice was more an instinctive reaction than a choice...
Posted by sally at 07:50 PM
So Tired, So Very, Very Tired...
They are rehearsing us like dogs and adding new things to our schedules, and exhorting us to memorize our lines faster, sooner, earlier. Then they wonder why we can't focus any more. And since Idaho is now one of the most virulent flu states and people in the department are beginning to drop like flies from it, they're also suggesting we rest.
Yeah.
I think that's what the flu is for. Enforcing rest.
I see the orthopedist today. I'm looking forward to at least knowing what the problem is. And I fully intend to demand access to physical therapy immediately. I'm beginning to lose muscle definition in my leg, and I'm going stir crazy with lack of exercise. I want to get started working it back to normal NOW.
Posted by sally at 08:05 AM
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