Swan Tower

For the last couple of months I've been having sessions with a guy who's sort of part physical trainer of the type you would find at a gym, part physical therapist. My sister's been working with him for ages; I decided to hop onto the bandwagon because (as some of you know) my ankles have been absolute crap for most of my life, but what I'd seen of how C goes about things made me believe he might be able to do something to improve that.

Which he has in fact done. The process isn't complete, of course -- in some ways it will probably never be complete -- but for the first time in years, I've started to feel like I can maybe trust my ankles. Getting to that point has involved not the familiar routines I've been given by every physical therapist I've ever seen, but stuff ranging from getting my arches to move again (which they had more or less stopped doing) to balance exercises aimed at reprogramming the way my eyes and my brain interact.

And also weight training. Which is where things get weird for me.

I've done very little of this kind of thing in my life. For a brief time I saw a regular trainer at a gym, and she gave me some upper-body stuff to do, but C's got me doing deadlifts and bizarre variations on back lunges where I do a one-handed shoulder press with a kettlebell before lunging and then lean over to put the palm of my other hand on the floor and so forth. And what I've discovered as I do this is . . . my brain just does not have any baseline for processing what the hell is going on.

Sometimes C will tell me to do something and I am absolute crap at it -- until suddenly I'm not. This happened with a small exercise where I was balancing a kettlebell upright in one hand: the first day I tried, I couldn't keep it in position for even five seconds, and then the next day I was doing fifteen, twenty, twenty-five seconds, no problem. It wasn't that I'd gotten stronger literally overnight; I think that somewhere between Day One and Day Two, my brain went ohhhh, I see what you're getting at. But what really gets me is that when I'm doing the strength exercises and my heart rate and breathing go up -- y'all, it turns out I have no sense of scale there. Not in the context of that kind of work. Ask me to do karate kata or swim 500 meters and sure, I know how to pace myself. I know how hard I'm working and whether I can maintain that for an extended period of time or not. But put a kettlebell in my hands and suddenly I have no freaking clue whether I need to slow down, whether my heart rate and breathing will continue to spike or whether they'll stay where they are, how many more reps I'll be able to do before my muscles give out. I'm probably working slower/easier than I'm actually capable of, because something in my hindbrain is freaking out over these unfamiliar sensations and telling me I need to back off before I 'splode.

I'll be interested to see how this changes over time. Presumably, as I get more familiar with the physicality of strength training, I'll get better at judging where I actually am on the effort scale. I'll also get stronger -- but I think that's a separate thing. At one point C asked me how hard a particular movement was on a scale of 1 to 10 and I didn't even know what to tell him. Another time he asked me that question, and I realized that while I didn't feel like I was exerting myself super hard, I also had this feeling like I was about two reps away from Nope Not Happening Anymore. A weird split between my strength, and the endurance that particular strength had.

It's a brave new world, yo. One in which I am closer to being able to do a squat than I've been in my entire life -- so that's something!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/mNeCzY)

So the orthopedist I’m going to right now because I’ve been having pain in the arches of my feet says that the common method of arthroscopic surgery for ligmaent repair doesn’t really work. I’m inclined to say he’s right, because of the two anterior talofibular ligaments I’ve had mended in the last decade, one is down to a shred of its former self and the other has gone AWOL entirely.

(Apparently ligaments can just . . . dissolve. Who knew.)

If I could travel back in time, forget about killing Hitler. (We all know that doesn’t work anyway.) I would go back thirty years and tell my childhood self to do ankle-strengthening exercises, and not to sit in certain ways that normal people are allowed to do but for people with ankles as loose as mine amounts to spraining them slowly and repeatedly over a period of years. Convincing an eight-year-old she needs to do daily physical therapy for the rest of her life is easier said than done, but “you’ll save yourself 2-4 ankle surgeries later on” ought to be a compelling argument: the two I’ve already had, and the two I’m crossing my fingers I can forestall.

Yeah. My ankles continue to suck, and their suckiness is now starting to cause arthritis in the arches of my feet. The good news is that the cartilege in my ankles, which is the big point of concern for my doctor, is apparently pristine; that means I don’t have to have surgery right now. We are in “wait and see” mode: I have PT to do not just short-term but in perpetuity, and I have slippers that will help stabilize my feet when I’m walking around the house, and if I’m very very good and a little bit lucky I might get to skip the part where they have to put cadaver ligaments in my ankles to replace what isn’t there anymore. Which, given the recovery for that and my tendency to form keloid scars if something sharp looks at my skin too closely, is good.

But if somebody could provide me with a time machine, eight-year-old me and I need to have a chat.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

So as many of you know, my husband had ankle surgery recently. He’s on crutches, putting no weight on the affected foot . . . for 8-10 weeks.

That’s a long time.

And while I can’t rightly compare my own difficulties to his, it’s going to be a long time for both of us. All of a sudden, I’m carrying most of the household on my own shoulders, because he can’t. Many tasks that I’m used to sharing with him (laundry, taking out the trash, etc) are now mine alone. Things that didn’t use to be tasks suddenly are: I have to be available when he goes to bed, because while it’s possible for him to drag his crutches and the pillow we’re using for his leg up the stairs as he slides up them — they’re too narrow for him to crutch up — it’s a pain in the neck, and much easier if I carry those for him. Some tasks that I would normally let slide for a little while now have to be kept 100% up-to-date; the ant infestation plaguing this entire city isn’t related to his surgery, but that doesn’t change the fact that I have to wash the dishes right away or risk finding a conga line of ants making their way across our kitchen to whatever I left out, and I have to keep the living room constantly tidy or he won’t be able to cross it safely on crutches.

But. My friends, I had a stroke of genius, and it already promises to do wonders for my sanity.

We’ve been making extensive use of stools and folding chairs in various places so he can kneel on them(1) while he showers or washes his hands or whatever. I found myself wondering whether it would help to put one of those in the kitchen, too — and then I thought, no. What we want in the kitchen is one of these.

It arrived this afternoon. Today, for the first time since his surgery, my husband scrubbed some dishes. He loaded the dishwasher and emptied it, too; he put dinner into the oven and took it out again. He can’t do everything; kneeling for too long is uncomfortable, and he has to be careful that it doesn’t roll out from under him and drop him into an unexpected split. But he can function. He can probably manage to bake some brownies if he wants to — and if you know my husband, you know how much that means to him.

And me? I was giddy with delight. The sheer fact of knowing that I don’t have to do everything kitchen-related is a relief all out of proportion to its actual size. Sure, I’m still facing another two months of having to carry his plate to him and then carry it back when he’s done, because you can’t really do that on crutches and the stool doesn’t transition well to carpet. But he can make his own sandwich for lunch without having to balance on one foot while he does it, even if I’m the one who carries it to the couch. He can wash dishes, which is a task that normally falls about 70-80% in his bailiwick instead of mine. He can prepare simple dinners. All of these are things I expected to have to do myself for weeks to come and now . . . now I know that he can help.

I’m well aware that the situation I have with him is business as usual for a lot of people. If you’re a single mother with a toddler, you’ve got to carry every bit as much weight, without the compensation of a charge who continually thanks you and can at least accomplish tasks that don’t require standing. And they don’t sell products on Amazon that will magically turn your toddler into more of a functioning adult. But if you ever find yourself dealing with a similar situation, remember the merits of a simple, flat-topped, caster-mounted stool. It can work wonders.

(1) Some of you will now be thinking of those kneeling scooters you’ve been seeing around lately. We rented one, but they don’t corner well at all, and our place is too small for him to easily navigate indoors on that thing. It’s useful only for when he leaves the house; the rest of the time, it’s crutches, which are far more maneuverable.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

I have bought a new dress for the World Fantasy banquet. I am sitting here trying to remember the last time I bought a dress that wasn’t a historical costume I paid somebody to sew for me.

I am failing.

As long as I’m on a roll of doing things I haven’t done in hmmmm let’s be conservative and say ten years?, I think I should also get new black heels. And this is where I turn to you, O internets, because I don’t like high heels (but I recognize their uses), and if there is any maker of heels who makes some I would actually like, I want to know about them.

My criteria are as follows. Each one should be footnoted with the caveat that I know I may not be able to get what I want, or at least may not be able to get all these things in one shoe. But I might as well try.

1. Not too high of a heel. You may recall I had ankle surgery less than three months ago. My ideal would be maybe 1-1.5″; anything above 2″ is Right Out at present. And in general I prefer lower heels, because . . .
2. Padding beneath the ball of the foot. I can and do use inserts to help with this, but it annoys me that we have an industry built around providing something I think the shoe ought to provide in the first place. I end up with a lot of foot pain if too much of my weight is on the ball of my foot for too long; it’s like my body is saying “we stopped doing this shit when you quit ballet at the age of eighteen, and aren’t going to put up with it anymore.”
3. Arch support. Does this even exist in high-heeled shoes? If so, tell me, because my god do I need it. I have stupidly high arches, and wearing shoes that don’t support them gets painful quite fast.
4. Allowance for a high instep. A lot of those strappy shoes put straps right across the top of my arches, which, as mentioned before, are quite high. Result: I feel like my foot’s being cut in half by my shoe. This one’s more of a stylistic thing than a characteristic I’m likely to find in a specific shoe manufacturer, but as long as I’m describing what I want, I ought to include everything.

Is there anybody who consistently makes shoes that match this description? Or even parts of this description? I could go to the store and try on shoes randomly until I find something that works, but I’d like to be more targeted in my shopping if possible. Seven years of dancing on pointe left me with an absolute lack of tolerance for badly-made or ill-fitting shoes, and a desire to avoid spending hours trying things on if at all possible.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

As of a few hours ago, I am officially Free of the Boot.

The boot is dead; long live th — wait, no, it can die in a fire.

I’ve graduated to a mere brace: a complex arrangement of laces and straps and velcro designed to make sure I don’t re-injure myself while I get my strength and mobility back. I suspect, though I can’t be sure, that I’m already off to a better start than I was last time, owing to all the PT I did beforehand. Stepping on my unbooted left foot is still mildly scary (and my heel hurts like crazy, it’s so tight), but it doesn’t feel as pathetically weak as I think the right one did post-boot.

Either way, I’m not going to waste any time. My first PT appointment is tomorrow morning! At this point I could probably do the relevant exercises in my sleep, but it’s good to have someone helping me pace myself, plus they have nice things like the electical stimulation machine that will speed my recovery along.

In the meanwhile, I’ll be over here curling my toes and rubbing my heel and generally rejoicing in the fact that I am free, free, FREE.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

My left ankle appears determined to play the Evil Twin, as it is getting up to all kinds of shenanigans that didn’t happen when I had surgery on my right ankle.

Let’s recap: when we last left our not-so-intrepid heroine, she’d dealt with an allergic reaction to her antibiotics, splitting headaches from her painkillers (which is just totally illogical and should be outlawed), and twitches of a sufficiently painful sort as to make her afraid she’d actually undone some of the surgeon’s work.

To that list, we may now add the following:

1) Recurrence of the exact same pain that caused me to go to the orthopedist in the first place. This is hopefully just part of the healing process, but when I called last Monday, they told me to make a new appointment if it didn’t stop by the end of the week. Well, I didn’t manage to call on Friday, and as of yesterday it was still happening (though less intensely and less frequently), but today it seems to be okay? We can hope.

2) A muscle relaxant that refuses to either have its advertised effect of relaxing muscles (seriously, I swear I twitch just as much on it as off), or to have the side effect of drowsiness. Which sucks when you actually want the stuff to help you get to sleep.

3) Itching in and around the scars that makes me want to scratch my foot bloody — and that’s when I’m sitting down. When I get up to walk, I want to just chop my foot off and make the whole thing end. Fortunately, I can get this somewhat under control with a raft of oral antihistamines, anti-itch cream, and band-aids over the scars to protect them chafing.

4) A massive charley horse in my calf about ten minutes ago, that made me yell loudly enough to make my husband come running. The good news here is that my ankle is stable enough at this point for me to take it out of the boot and use a foam roller on my calf, which at least helps a little.

All of which I share partly to vent, and partly because I know I have enough writers reading my blog to think you all might as well get some anecdotal notes in case you ever have to write about a character recovering from something like this. >_<

I will be so glad when this is done.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

I’m back from Okinawa (about which more later), and as of this morning, I am done with the ankle surgery. But only with the surgery part of it: now I’m facing a month of incarceration in a plastic boot.

Since I’ve done this before, I have the dubious joy of knowing exactly what I’m in for. Though I’ve made at least one improvement this time around; putting one of my arch support inserts in the boot has done wonders for the circulation to my toes, which I remember as one of the chief miseries of the last round. On the other hand, this evening my foot twitched in a fashion that sent a bad enough spike of pain up my leg for me to call my orthopedist, except it was after office hours, so I probably won’t hear back from him until tomorrow. So that officially undoes all my happiness at the circulation thing. >_<

This is the most tedious part. I can’t do anything to speed my recovery; I can only (try to) avoid setting it back. In a month I’ll get to do PT, which will be a joy by comparison — please remind me of that when I’m suffering through it. But at least the surgery itself is over, which is a relief.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

I made reference to this in my previous post; I’d forgotten that I hadn’t actually said anything about it before now.

I’m going to Okinawa in July. Every few years, on an irregular schedule, Shihan and various other people put together an intensive karate and kobudo seminar, bringing in people from a variety of countries (Germany, Spain, Denmark, the U.S.) for about a week in Naha and on Kori Island. It will be my first time going; the last one was five years ago, and I was much too low-ranking to attend. Sometimes there’s a tournament, but apparently Shihan got tired of waiting for other parties to get their act together, so this time it’s a seminar only.

I made the decision to go before I knew I was having ankle problems; I paid the fee before I got told I was going to need surgery. But honesty compels me to admit that before I went to the doctor, I told Kyle that I didn’t care what the prognosis was, I was going to Okinawa anyway. Because it’s bad enough to have to do this again: I will be damned if I let it take away my chance to experience that kind of intensive training. I’m going to be sweating to death for 4-6 hours a day in an un-air-conditioned budokan, and that isn’t exactly a thing to look forward to — but I am.

And then I’ll come home and have surgery and not go to karate for a month or more. But before then, I’ll work my butt off.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

I'm not usually much of a shipper (in the fanfic sense) . . . but I want ALL THE HAWKEYE/BLACK WIDOW FIC NOW.

Ahem. Apart from me loving those two and wanting them to get their own movie, I thought The Avengers was quite excellent. Once I have it on DVD, I may well sit down and try to pick apart just how the writers managed to balance their script. Superhero movies have foundered before on the "too many heroes/villains" problem, but this one did a remarkable job of giving each character a meaningful role, without letting the pacing bog down in side tangents. It's helped, of course, by the fact that they're operating off a whole slew of individual movies -- but that doesn't account for all of it, because you can do that and still have a terrible team-up (just look to comic books for proof). This one handled things very deftly, I thought, and I'd love to dig into how.

And now, I crash. Because I survived my first kobudo seminar today (though I'm not sure my feet did), and have earned my rest. :-)

Sometimes I think it might be refreshing to break my arm.

I don't want a broken arm, of course. But if I'm going to injure something, it might be a nice change of pace to have it be something on the upper half of my body, instead of the lower.

What brings this on? Oh, the little toe of my left foot, which I have just broken for the third freaking time. Also the middle toe of that foot, which is sprained: a nice companion to the sprain in the big toe of my right foot that I suffered last year. And the ankle surgery when I was nine, and the ankle surgery when I was twenty-nine -- same ankle, natch -- not to mention the countless sprains on that front over the years. And (for a minor change of pace) the damaged cartilege in my left knee, and the problem with the saphenous nerve in my right leg that never did get explained but eventually went away.

But I suppose between me and my brother's four broken arms*, we balance out. Whoever was responsible for dealing out injuries to my family really needed to shuffle the deck better.

Anyway, in the grand scheme of things this is minor; I probably won't even get it x-rayed. (There's no point unless the fracture is displaced enough to potentially cause mobility problems later on, and at the moment there's no particular reason to think that's the case.) It is certainly not truepenny's recent catastrophe with her ankle. But I gotta say that it's bloody annoying.



*That is, he's had a broken arm four times. He does not have four arms that got broken.