This Old Blog

Today was my wife's fourth back operation she's had to undergo. Her first was nearly 20 years ago. As each operation has been performed hardware has been both added and removed from her lower back. The first major set of hardware was composed of surgical steel, and was removed when the second major set built out of titanium was added. This time the titanium set has came out. The latest operation used a far smaller incision than any prior and orthoscopic-based tools and techniques to minimize the "trauma" of cutting into the body. The amount of hardware they use now was remarkably small compared to the last time. The surgeon also used stem cells this time in order to stimulate the regrowth of bone in the lower back. We arrived at 6am, she was prepped and the operation started at 7am. An hour and a half later she was in recovery and stayed there until about 11:30am. She's been in great spirits and has required remarkably little pain medication. That need for ...

Saturday morning started way too early for me. My Saturdays are sacrosanct; I consider it, along with Sunday, to be my days of rest. But my wife had an early morning MRI appointment at Florida Hospital. So I woke us both up while it was still dark, even for daylight savings time, and drove us both to the appointment. The MRI waiting room was done up in classic Florida Hospital tans and browns. I suppose they carried out some sort of study and decided this had a calming effect on people waiting in their waiting rooms. Or maybe it was picked because it's the cheapest. Regardless, I got to sit for nearly two hours while they ran all the tests on my wife. I'd brought my Nexus 7 tablet with me, and settled down reading my Analog and Asimov science fiction magazines via the Nook app. In the background a large flat panel TV was playing episode after episode (no commercial interruptions!) of Law and Order, from the seasons with Jerry Orbach as Det. Lennie Briscoe. It's kind of...

Sony NEX 5N, 18-55mm at 55mm, f/6.3, 1/1000 sec, ISO 100, auto WB Olympus E-PL2, M.Zuiko 45mm, f/4, 1/4000 sec, ISO 200, sunny WB I was at RDV for my second weekly physical training session (I run three per week). As I was leaving I happened to spy the dramatic clouds over the complex. I had both my Sony NEX and one of my Pens with me, so I took a few very unscientific photos just to see how they would compare photographing the same general subject matter. Both photographs were taken straight from their respective cameras and put directly into this post. Both photos are at the largest JPEG size from each camera. Both cameras were configured to use natural color, and the natural setting was further tweaked so that contrast and saturation were set to -1 on both cameras, and sharpness set to 0 (the default). They are definitely different, but I'll be damned if I'll say which is better than the other. The Olympus seems grayer, more neutral, because I forgot to set it to A...

I have been making reasonable (some might say remarkable) progress this week towards healing in my left knee. I'm pushing myself to do as much exercise as reasonable while I'm still off from work. I've been mixing workouts at RDV in the therapy pool as well as regular "dry land" PT, to the point where I'm doing something every day. I've been doing that now for nearly two weeks. For many of you this may not sound like much, but this past Sunday, three weeks to the day after being discharged from Florida Hospital, I was able to drive to RDV and the pool. And I've been driving every since. Not very far and not for long, but still. Tonight I was able to take both Labs, together, for a regular one mile walk in the neighborhood. They were ecstatic. I'm on track to go back to work next Monday, four weeks after the partial knee replacement. My company is still allowing time off for me to go three days/week in the afternoons to RDV for continuing PT t...

I didn't realize it until I went back and looked, but it's been a year and a day since I first had to deal with my left knee , other than to use it and ignore it. It was a year ago that I took my first trip to the hospital emergency room and from there to physical therapy and then more doctors, leading up to the MAKOplasty operation two weeks ago . Since that event I've been home recuperating, daily following the directions of the physical therapy people to slowly gain complete reuse of the left knee, and the left leg. The pain caused by the loss of cartilage within the joint is gone. Completely gone. The pain I feel now is different, more a healing pain, and far less intense than before the operation. My walking is limited, but I no longer walk with a limp. That's gone completely. The only issue at the moment is lack of flexibility in the left knee. It's still swollen, but the swelling goes down slowly but steadily. The home-based PT helps me to build up flex...

They discharged me Sunday afternoon from the hospital. I'm home ensconced in my big leather recliner in the TV room to keep the knee up at a proper level. I get up to go to the head because I'm drinking lots of water to rid my body of the residual anesthesia. That gives me lots of opportunities to exercise the knee.  I've also got plenty of time to do my 11 physical therapy exercises three times a day. Thing hurt, but it's a healing hurt, and I'm taking my sweet time to make sure I don't do anything wrong. The physical therapists at Florida Hospital worked with me Friday, Saturday and Sunday to go over the key exercises. Today I'm flying solo. Starting tomorrow for the next two weeks I'll have a nurse come by once/day to check and make sure progress is being made and nothing goes wrong. And of course I have my security camera with me. Photo was taken with the Sony in black and white and post processed on my wife's Macbook Pro. I resized it in Oly...

WARNING: NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH After a year of limping and increasing pain in the left knee, I finally went under the knife on Friday to have a partial knee replacement. I'd already gotten three separate opinions that all said essentially the same thing: the knee was a bit of a mess and needed some degree of work/reconstruction/whatever. I eventually went with the Florida Hospital Fracture Care Center . My wife had her left knee replaced by them (a second time) in 2008. Her surgeon was Dr. J. Dean Cole. I knew and trusted the group, but I was still too chicken to do it before now. My surgeon from that group was Dr. Brian Vickaryous (pronounced "vicarious" or simply Dr. V). I like Dr. V for a number of reasons, but the most important is his past. In the mid-2000s he was a Major in the Army and an orthopedic surgeon with the 8th Forward Surgical Team in Iraq ( In Iraq, 'it's us versus death'; Mass.-based unit on constant call ). Dr. V has seriously got his...

Personal I'm going through pre-op right now (blood, x-rays) for a new awesome cyborg left knee replacement on November 2nd. I've been living with this gimpy human left knee for over a year. Last November it went to hell in a hand basket right after I flew up to Ann Arbor on a business trip. The weekend after I returned I wound up in an emergency room unable to really use the stupid thing. After months of medication and physical therapy it's finally come down to surgery and a partial knee replacement. Today I drove to Dr. P. Phillips hospital with my scripts and my NEX 5N with an OM 2.8/28mm to take care of everything. The original scripts had me going to Quest Diagnostics here in Orlando for the blood work. I've been to Quest in the past and I've not been particularly happy. To walk into a Quest is to walk into a location that looks like it's seen better days. Dirty carpets, stained furniture, scruffy walls. It makes me wonder if I'll catch something l...

So here it is mid-week and I'm still nursing this wonky left knee. I was having a bit of cabin fever today so I drove out to Lime Fresh Mexican Grill for lunch with my wife. I ate one of their queso burritos and my wife had their fish tacos. I've come to prefer Lime Fresh over Tijuana Flats. It was great to get outside into the really nice weather. When last we looked, I'd spent an eight-hour stint in the emergency room Sunday at Florida Hospital South near Winter Park. I managed (via my wife's persistence on the phone) to get into an MRI facility late Monday evening (8:30pm) so they could scan my left knee. I managed to get in after my wife went to a physician's office in the area that knew her, and the nurses at that office called back to the charge nurse at the ER I'd been in on Sunday. So for an hour and a half, 45 minutes of which was spent clamped down and stuck in the noisy-as-hell MRI machine (I was wearing ear plugs), I had my old and busted left kn...

Ode to an Orange Pop Carbonated Water, Citric Acid , Sodium Citrate , Malic Acid , Sodium Benzoate (Preservative), Aspartame , Modified Food Starch , Acelsulfame Potassium , Natural Flavors, Caffeine , Ester Gum , Yellow 6 , Red 40 . Phenylketonurics : Contains Phenylalanine

The Mask... I have a mild form of obstructive sleep apnea . Mild in the sense that I'm not in danger of dropping dead due to a heart attack (I'm also fortunate that I don't smoke, and never have). But it is bad enough that it's causing issues with being able to operate during the day, and I've lost my cognitive "edge", that ability to quickly solve problems. And in a technologically driven world like ours is, that's bad news. What's worse is the snoring. That drives my wife crazy some nights when it's really bad. Either she leaves, or she pokes me to wake up and makes me leave. And it's reached the point where I just sleep in another bedroom at night so she can have a decent night's sleep. I discovered a lot of this at a downtown sleep center in late December of last year. The diagnosis was made, and continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, was proscribed. From my perspective it's the mildest, least invasive technique f...