C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 138

chiropractic—relief

I've got a dicey upper back. For one thing, I live at a keyboard. I have upper shoulder muscles that rival any male weightlifter. And I have a neck with problems.

I don't like traction much: last time I had it was years ago, and it's changed very much for the better.

About 30 years ago, a prankster in a car took a dive at me on a downhill bike run; and the city had installed a storm drain grating in the wrong direction. I dodged the idiot with the car and the attitude, but in the dodge, I found myself facing that storm drain. I was almost good enough to ride one crossbar of that trap clear across, but on the second half of it, my front wheel dropped into the storm drain up to the axle. Flipped me into a potential faceplant on pavement…or a broken neck. I was younger, athletic, and managed not to flip or hit my face—I karate-chopped the oncoming pavement with both forearms, and managed to drive myself forward with roadrash on my throat, but I didn't, thank God, flip and break my neck. Did the jerk stop? No. He kept going.

I've suffered lifelong from the effects of that one. And over the years my upper back has just gotten stiffer and stiffer—muscles in near-permanent contraction, stiff, and really mind-bendingly sore, and now I've got a left arm stiffening up: it's been years since I've been able to turn my head to the left.

Well, I finally got desperate enough to ask Dr. Shane if in addition to the impactor therapy he's using on the arm, I could try neck traction and see if it could get any relaxation in my shoulders.

Amazing how non-event the traction feels when you haven't got any feeling of motion in your shoulders. But 10 minutes of it, and I could begin to feel something going on. Like maybe there was increased circulation. Heat. That's all I got—first session and the doc's being cautious. But it freed up my back for maybe the first time it's relaxed this much in 20 years. It feels hot. It gave me a bit of a headache. I iced it all night. It's painful. But it's a minor, good kind of pain, that you get from a situation relieved, not exacerbated. And the sensation of relaxation is interesting. It's not quite relaxed. But it's no longer locked. This has possibilities.

National Talk Like A Pirate Day…in case ye hadn't noticed.

We're great 'pirate' fans. When we do costume, that's us. No discussing the last Pirate movie: we haven't had a chance to see it, for good or ill. So no loose talk, eh?

Vesta flyby…up close and personal with an asteriod with a 9 mile high mountain…

36 large pieces of chicken and a loaf of bread…

…are the order for the day. I buy in bulk, cook once, freeze most, use it diced; and while I tried oven roasting, I decided the best-tasting and fastest way was the good old George Foreman grill. I have the little one: I just set the timer for 15 minutes, to be sure it's done, and just keep loading it on. The bread—is my old standby, most of a pound of white flour, 1 half cup of brown rice flour and a cup of wheat bran, atop 1 1/2 cup water, teaspoon honey or maple syrup, teaspoon salt, 2 T of olive oil, and 2 tsp yeast. The rice flour and bran make the hard crust super delicate and crunchy. The chicken tonight will be heated chicken bits, finished in hot olive oil with salt, pepper, dill; then liberally coated with grated Parmesan, atop Caesar salad, with fresh bread. Tomorrow, and for several days, chicken stir fry, probably with rice; and then a quesadilla in my new maker: mostly mixed cheese, jalapeno, and a spoonful of Texas chili. Also with Caesar salad. It saves brain work, when the cooking is that neatly laid out. The chicken will go from now halfway through October, so rotation of that menu—stir fry is easy to vary—and we're good.

I also got a neat gadget from Amazon, a bread slicing guide, to keep my slices straight, that sits on a neat little wooden grid that catches the crumbs before they get all over the kitchen. Neat. I just wrap the loaf in a teatowel, and set it on this until ready to slice, and we have no crumbs! Yay! (Jane also rejoices…)

Keep in mind OSG and OSGuy's kitteh Kate, who's a wonderful kitteh-person: she's very old, and not doing well. They were up at all hours with her. Just think good thoughts their way, and hope things can be as good as they can possibly be.

 

 

 

I got a clean bill from the doc…

Feeling pretty good. This was a checkup with the endocrinologist. I've got a bruise the size of a baseball at my elbow, but I'll live. Just a little short on vitamin D—despite my hours in the sun. Hey, age does that to you: that's why I'm s'posed to take the supplement. I got off my vitamin regimen in all the confusion of Jane's illness and need to get back on it, but outside of that I'm doing fine.

Fall is on the horizon…

They tell us the weather is going to shift. Those of you who have struggled weather-wise and from the floods, I hope this foretells a change and a better season. Once the cold comes down, we may shovel, but it's not friendly to hurricanes, at least. And we don't mind shoveling—better than summer heat, in my book.

I'm (in between writing) sanding the weathered surface off our old wooden back yard rocker-chairs: several things occur to me—1) a thought on the 10th anniversary of losing my father—I could very vividly remember him telling me what to do with the process, almost as as if he was standing there—we'd done it so many times. Parents have a way of staying with you in little ways. 2) wood is more durable than metal in unexpected ways. I can just sand off that neglected surface and revarnish and have it as strong as ever. The metal is far more fragile, re rust and other destructive processes. If you have to choose something of that nature, wooden chairs are not a bad deal, if you don't mind a little maintenance. Rather than trashing some unsightly chairs, they'll have another decade of service. 3) there's a real pleasure in working with wood. I'm quite allergic to recently live wood, particularly oak, but I love it. This is cedar. And the grain in it is occasionally so pretty it could be in a musical instrument. I can't bear to paint it. It's going to get Min-waxed, transparent color, probably as Jane suggested, in a reddish stain. 4) Some aspects of writing are easier while working with one's hands on something totally different. I can stand there and run the sander and think.

Routine blood test…mine…

…or should I say, 'excavation.'

I've had a lot of blood tests in my life. I'm cool. I've had IV's. Cool. No problem. Went in for my routine test-check (I take thyroid meds, so they're mandatory, to check levels—kind of like checking my marine tank chemistry.).

Problem #1, realizing how very important a good baseline test can be (witness Jane's situation, where we have a multiyear history of tests, and a recent one, which helped a lot)—I just wanted the endocrinologist's office to run the red blood cell stuff, for anemia, just in case, since I had a childhood history of it. So I call the office. Can't do it, gotta talk to his nurse. Can't get her. I leave a very clear message for her about wanting that test. She calls when I'm out, and tells me, yes, my test is in the system. That's not what I flippin' asked, but one can hope.

Problem #2: if you're going to have a cholesterol test, you're supposed to abstain from food for 12-14 hours prior. Now, I routinely do, in case someone's flubbed up on telling me.

They flubbed up on telling me. Now I had two people telling me it's ok to eat because they'd surely tell you. Well, I hedged the deadline by a bit, really crowding the 12 hours. So who knows what they'll find?

Problem #3: they didn't have the anemia test, the h&h stuff, authorized. That's scheduled for February. Thanks. Thanks a lot. So much for communication.

Problem #4: I draw a nice cheery lab tech that ignores my advice to use the left arm, and insists she knows right where a vein is in the right. Now, I've had this done so much my veins are chancy, and Miss Knows-it-all jammed the thing in deep, and I think went right through both walls of the vein…we got one good vial, and then—nada. A tiny trickle. It took waaaaaaaaaay long to fill another vial, and she could only get half a vial to finish with. So nice. Then she wraps up my arm and sends me on my way, and when I got the bandage off, I've got a bruise that makes me look like a junkie. And it's sore.

I just can't wait to get to the doc's office and find out they drew mostly lymphatic fluid and have to run it all again.

We are beginning the great Decoration Season…with Halloween.

Jane being a Halloween baby, sort of, (a week before) she always gets black cats…all sorts of black cats,. And we have lots of Halloween decorations. We decorate for every season—but this is the beginning of the cycle. First comes Halloween. That will give way, on Thanksgiving Day, to Christmas decorations, when the black cats give way to Jane's other adored animal—stags. Not reindeer. Stags. Deer with Attitude. I have snowflake fairys, Hallmark vintage, a large collection thereof; but Jane's stags and my snowflakes and such predominate. Then Christmas specifically gives way to Winter: the tree goes by the end of January. Winter decor and oil lamps linger until the thaw, and then Spring decorations come out: spring flowers in vases and Flower Fairies that go with them. This year—well, Spring continued until Halloween. We were too frazzled to bring out the Summer Dragon (a Chinese red and gold medallion) and the summer flowers, real ones, often, in vases. We just had spring right through til now—and seeing Jane happily taking the leisure to decorate the living room in black cats and autumn leaves and ceramic pumpkins makes me remember how much I have to be thankful for, so it's sort of Thanksgiving rolled right up into it all.

Continuing the walking program…

I was going great guns until the Ysabel Yncident. A little harder to go for the daily walk when you're on killer antibiotic…just not quite the energy to spare. But it's a lot easier than going for the walk when you've got a raging systemic infection, so, well, we're not complaining.

We live in an area of 1950′s vintage, next to an area of 1930′s homes, in a climate where gardening is more than possible, and it's an interesting walk in any direction. You find out details. Most houses in Spokane proper have basements. The houses across the arterial from us don't—they're sitting directly on the basalt, with a thin veneer of lawn. We have more depth, but they threw the excavation dirt from our basement (glacial moraine) atop the dirt we had, then added an even thinner veneer of dirt. So our block has either struggling, forever-being-watered lawns, or the owners have gone to big drives and beds of trees and bushes and mulch, on relatively smaller lots. We have about the biggest lot, twice the size of some, and, crazy us, decided to join the trees-bushes-mulch crowd.

Across the arterial, the basalt drove some people who wanted basements to do the California style, 1960′s-70′s style, ie, a more shallow basement excavation and part of it above ground as a sort of a half-buried lower story. That's pretty popular. Then there are those that went for raaaaaaaaaaaaancher, ie, like ours but extended sideways: a fair hike from one end to the other, and all of it 'finished'. As half our basement isn't, but we like it split that way. And the ones who built 'up' for a second storey, or added on—one house has a lovely huge patio on the second level, on the roof of their garage.

Interesting is the word for the architecture around here. One house we looked at was from the 1800′s, and the basement was a bit of a maze; another was from the 1925-30′s era, and I think got through Prohibition by having their own speakeasy in the basement, which was redecorated in the 50′s, but I'm pretty sure there could have been some home brewing going on down there, and most houses don't have a dance floor, however tiny.

We live within hiking distance of 3 parks, old, old parks, with towering Ponderosa pine. I think I've heard that the same guy who designed Spokane's parks was the guy who worked on Central Park in NYC. The idea is that every neighborhood has a green space of trees, where you can go and decompress—and they've become venues for dog walking (Corbin), for children's playgrounds, including water jets (Shadle), and for art fairs and concerts (Coeur d'Alene Park)…and then there's huge Manito Park, with its rose gardens, huge rolling lawns, etc, near the Japanese Garden…just a very nice aspect of this little big city.

 

We are the walking wounded: zombie alert.

Sigh. We have battled that security door to a near standstill but cannot get the locking mechanism to go on square, and I am thinking it's because we disassembled the door and grid to paint it, and the 30-odd-year-old door is now in a disrupted configuration, the sort of thing you'd measure with calipers, because of  paint layers, because of gravity, because of tightened screws. Jane's trying various things to adjust it. If peeling the paint off the latch-guard doesn't work, then the other theory applies, and I say just let the damn thing hang and let gravity do it.

Jane is bruised and sore: the front door is 36 wide solid maple about 2″ thick, and very heavy. Up and down steps, up and down from sawhorses, etc.

We've boiled the paint off the very nice solid brass hinges and screws, but the baked on enamel of the latch-guard is another matter.

Meanwhile Ysabel is getting just a little prone to revisit her youth, ie, the irritable bit, and when I clipped an overgrown dew claw that was causing her pain WITHOUT using the muzzle, as a stress on the kitteh—she nailed me on the knuckle, a really hard bite that got her fangs into the joint.

Well, that's a problem: it clearly penetrated membranes, probably hit bone or cartilage, and could have gotten into the joint. I forgive her: she's just old, and hurts a bit. So do I, kitteh. Especially my hand. It puffed up like a pigeon egg, and turned red. I soaked it in Epsom salts, but that was too little to solve this one. I know there's a Pasturella issue—or I know the name of it after getting hold of OSG late on a sleep-in Saturday and getting a prescription; but I already knew it was an antibiotic type problem of serious nature. Or as she said, ER at 3am if I hadn't gotten the prescription. So I'm on horse pills (Amphi- or Amoxi-cillin or some such). It was serious enough that 20 or so minutes after I took the pill, I got this rush of heat in the arm on that side, clear up to the top of the biceps. Which was where the warzone of bacteria had gotten to since getting bit that morning (it was suppertime). The swelling that had spread to the second knuckle diminished, it's gotten better today, and I'll be fine.

Ysabel…butter wouldn't melt in that needle-sharp mouth. She's an old lady, but her canines and jaw muscles are in top form. She's being so sweet today.

You want to see sincere cute, catch the pix of Shu and Sei sharing a nap on Jane's site.