As many of my regular readers know, I’m slowly recovering from an accident I had in November 2010.
I spent until February in plaster, seven casts in total and have been a regular with a rehabilitation specialist, surgeons and physiotherapists since then, as we work hard to get my distrophic foot back into working order.
We have progress, definite progress: not the sort of thing that you can see on a daily or weekly basis but over months it clear that the amount of flexibility and pressure I can bear is ever growing and that my exercises are getting progressively more intensive and extensive.After some frustrating months at the beginning of the year I demanded a long term projection for recovery and the surgeon said “best case scenario = Christmas this year, worst case scenario = next Summer“.
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
At this point my plotted course of ever increasing graded activity is going well, it’s painful and it’s tiring but we just keep plodding away at it. Being off crutches by Christmas has already been ruled out at this point, but there is hope that that might happen early in the New Year for short distances at least.
Meantime I have been trying to make the best of my recovery time, of course most days that means exercises, sleep, work and since everything on crutches takes a stupid amount of effort nothing gets done in a hurry.
As others rush past in the fast lane of life, I am chugging along in the slow lane hugging the hard shoulder of life. At least the engine is still running, but the slowness does get to me some days. That’s normal, and I’ll survive it, boredom and frustration are not usually life threatening unless you add extra stupidity and my new middle name is ” mega-cautious”.
Anyway, you usually have to catch stupidity with both hands and mine are firmly on the crutches. … and Himself will tell you that I’m the worst catcher in the whole world (if you don’t count colds). The silver lining to spending vast amounts of time cooped up at home resting has been that my asthma has been good this year. I’ve dodged three colds that Little Mr shared around, each of them being more annoying than nasty and giving me a head like a brick but not lung problems, after several days they departed and I was a happy bunny again.
In recent weeks though I’ve been nursing a cold that doesn’t want to give up. My lungs are chemically damaged and my asthma is severe, so a bad cold needs to be taken seriously therefore after a week of coughing and sniffing I phoned my Lung Specialist and we did a telephone consult of symptoms and medications.
I have my own portable nebulizer so try to avoid necessary additional hospital visits if I can via an arrangement where I let the Lung Specialist know when things are getting out of hand and he faxes though prescriptions to my local pharmacy so that we can hopefully intervene in the early stages of a bronchial meltdown. We did that last week but the coughing is worse not better so Himself dropped me off Monday for an emergency visit. Yuck and darn, Bronchitis.
The coughing on the hard shoulder of life has now turned into a small pit-stop in one of life’s lay-bys as I tank up on enough drugs to equip a third world pharmacy. The cards I got dealt on the health front in the last year have been a pretty lousy hand, but I’m not folding, let’s look at it positively, I may have slipped from First to Neutral right now but at least it isn’t Reverse!
Once again I’m appreciating your comments and support, the main reason I’m not replying much is that I’ve concentrated on getting a lot of blog posts up whenever I have a good hour and have no energy left over for the rest. Life IS still good, it’s just got a running nose, sore throat and constant cough at my place so it’s in bed laying low.
I’ll be back to my chattier self soonest I promise!
