Husband and I are pretty anxious right now to find out how our dog is doing at the vet. We had to take him there Thursday after three days of constant hurling after meals. The vet did x-rays and found him to be constipated and dehydrated. There is the possibility that he has an upper intestinal blockage of some sort, perhaps from the shards of an Icelandic lamb horn, or the Kong Wubba he chewed and destroyed over the weekend, or a mixture of both. He hasn’t had anything different to eat for the past couple of weeks. He has been drinking water like crazy, though. He typically doesn’t swallow what he destroys, so we can’t think what would have plugged him up.
It is hard to tell when a terrier is under the weather, as they typically don’t let you know they aren’t feeling well until they are half dead. Even before we took him to the vet he wanted to tug, steal things, and go for walks. They are giving him special IV’s to hydrate him and get his digestive system flowing, as it were. They will do surgery if that doesn’t work. I refuse to take as on omen that the flock of vultures on the local butte were circling our home as I wrote this.
What health issues have your pets had? How can you tell your pets or human companions aren’t feeling well?
Husband and I have four rolling pins. Two are French-style ones I use for pie crusts, one is a knobby one for hardtack, and the biggest one with narrow grooves is for lefse. I use the French ones pretty regularly. The lefse rolling pin only comes out in November, that is, until now, thanks to my physical therapist.
My physical therapist really likes to attack knots in my sore muscles by vigorously rubbing them. This is not gentle massage. It hurts, but helps loosen the muscles. The other day at my PT appointment after the heating pad and dry needling there were very sore knots on the muscles on the outside of my right leg above my knee. My therapist got out a large and heavy styrofoam roller and rolled it up and down those muscle knots for about 10 minutes. After she was finished it felt wonderful. I told her I thought I could do the same thing at home with a rolling pin. She agreed, but cautioned that the narrower circumference of the rolling pin might hurt more than her roller did.
I spent a good amount of time Saturday doing my PT exercises and rolling the lefse rolling pin up and down the knots in my leg. I had the most pain-free day I have had in a couple of months.
What is your preferred rolling pin? What are some alternative uses you have found for objects? Any odd home remedies you have tried or heard of?
I think I know why it takes so long to become a doctor. You have to learn a completely different language:
This accessory muscle is located posteromedially, originating from the fascia of the deep posterior compartment at a level posterior to the tibiotalar joint and talus and then extends inferiorly, deep to the flexor retinaculum, posterior and superficial to the traversing tibial nerve and posterior tibial artery within the tarsal tunnel, inserting distally upon the quadratus plantae muscle (axial series 2, Images 6-22, sagittal series 4, images 15-11 and coronal series 7, images 7-10.)
Even after Dr. Moser showed me the MRI images and “explained” it to me, I’m still not sure exactly what the issue is except that it seems to be related to my initial ankle sprain (20 years ago – a bad sprain that took several months to feel better). No pinched anything, no compressed anything, no torn anything and in what was clearly a surprise to the doctor, no arthritis. He did point out what he called some edema – that’s about it. Two co-pays and an MRI to get told my ankle hurts.
Sent home with a brace and a couple of physical therapy appointments. In the meantime, I suppose the fact that there isn’t any arthritis is the good news I’ll try to keep in mind.
Do you have a favorite tongue-twister from childhood?
A mental state achieved by concentrating on the present moment, while calmly accepting the feelings and thoughts that come to you,
Mindfulness is a therapeutic strategy all the rage in mental health treatment. I personally find it annoying and tiresome to pay attention to what is going on in my thoughts and my body for extended periods of time, It has been very helpful lately, however, as I have struggled with some pain.
I have had crappy posture all my life. I slouch, even when I am sitting. I probably have a weak upper body and don’t do enough exercise. A few years ago I was having a great deal of back pain and found that I have lumbar scoliosis. I had Physical Therapy, and that helped a lot. I didn’t change my posture, though. Last year I struggled with sciatica down both legs, and PT also helped with that. For the past couple of months, though the sciatica came back with a vengeance, and there have been times I thought I needed a cane as my left leg would give out on me with intense pain while I walked, and I was afraid I was going to fall. I have a lumbar support chair at work that that didn’t help at all.
I decided I needed to do something about this, and I realized that when I sit, walk, or stand (especially in the kitchen when I cook) I slump my lower back outward in such a way that I was pinching a nerve in my left leg. I have started to direct my attention to my lower back and its position, keeping it straight, and for two weeks now my leg pain has disappeared. My lower back has protested somewhat as I am making it go into a position it hasn’t had to be in for some time, but I think I am on the right track. I am mindful of my back position when I drive, when I sit at my desk, when I stand, and when I walk. I hope that it will become automatic for me one of these days, but I may have to resign myself to have to practice mindfulness for a long time.
What do you need to be mindful of? What are you prone to ignore that you should pay attention to?
There have been some strange happenings here in usually dull ND that could be the basis of some interesting mytery or science fiction stories.
The first event was in Fargo. A couple of weeks ago there was a story in the Fargo Forum about a spat between a local hospital system and a medical waste disposal company It seems that a human torso showed up in a bin at the medical waste company, and the company blamed the hospital and the hospital blamed the medical waste company.
No one has indicated the identity of the body, or where the rest of the body is. Hmm.
The second mystery is closer to home, in our driveway. About two weeks ago, Husband found the decapitated, eviscerated corpse of a small cottontail rabbit. The head was lying right by the body. All the entrails were gone. Our dog is never in the front yard. We have no roaming cats or dogs in the neighborhood. Who (or what) could have done this? We live in the middle of town. Hmm.
Come up with some hypotheses for these strange events. Could they be linked?
Husband is a sort of left-handed person who does everything he learned before the age of 5 with his left hand. Everything he learned thereafter he does with his right hand. He needs both his hands to function. He switches hands often. Although he writes left-handed, he is right-eye dominant.
He has spent decades typing/ keyboarding multitudes of psychological evaluations, and is a keyboard slammer, particularly with his right hand. It is no surprise that he has carpal tunnel issues in his right hand. It didn’t help that he fell on the ice this winter while walking the dog and sprained his right hand.
He is scheduled for carpal tunnel surgery June 30th. He is quite nervous as he has never had surgery before. I wish I could be more sympathetic. My first surgery, for an umbilical hernia, was at age 9 months, with several surgeries since. I just hope his fingers are no longer numb and he can button his own cuff buttons.
Have you or anyone you know had carpal tunnel surgery? Did it help? What are your surgical experiences?
Husband came home Wednesday from his work day in Bismarck to find his right big toe was swollen from gout. He drives to Bismarck on Tuesday nights, stays at a hotel, and works at the Human Service Center all day on Wednesday. Sometimes he takes lunch with him from home in a cooler, but he often just scrambles for lunch on the fly from the grocery stores. Wednesday it was hummus.
Chickpeas are really bad for gout. He knows this, but really loves hummus. He still eats it. He also is seriously allergic to cats, but we have had cats in our home for 35 years. A dripping nose and sneezing are more tolerable to him than the absence of purring. A swollen toe is worth some hummus. I know I could never give up down pillows or comforters if I became allergic to feathers.
My Uncle Alvie, the poker player, always broke out in hives when he ate fresh strawberries. He always feasted on his wife’s homegrown strawberries though, no matter how itchy he got. I know that allergic reactions can be serious. I had a graduate school friend who would go into anaphylaxis if she walked into a home with gerbils or guinea pigs. A work friend recently got a bunny for her son and after a few hours her eyes swelled shut and poor Coco had to go back to his breeder. They were heartbroken.
Do you have allergies? What would be hard for you to give up for allergies or health issues?
My dad was a big baby about getting sick. Luckily he didn’t get sick often – mostly when my mom would just be recovering from something. Right about the time she was feeling a bit better, he would come down with whatever bug had afflicted her. My sister and I had always joked about it but then it got really funny the summer before my junior year when he caught my mom’s “persistent stomach flu” and it turned out she was actually pregnant.
That old trope about women marrying men like their fathers hit a little too close to home with my second was-band. He was pathetic and unbelievably whiny when he was ill – to the point that I was usually out of patience within the first 24 hours. Me!
With these shining examples, I’ve pretty much always kept my sicknesses to myself. Since my doctors figured out my adult-onset allergies, I’ve actually been quite healthy for the last 20 years, including managing to get through pandemic so far without contracting any of the variants. Then last week I came down with a cold (yep, just a cold; I’ve tested twice). It’s the first time I’ve had a cold in at least 10 years.
Being retired, I didn’t need to call in sick so except for an occasional “stuck with a summer cold” text, I was pretty much just laying low. As the weekend approached, I realized I might have a couple of conflicts that didn’t jive well with having a bad cold. First was my other book club that was scheduled at my house on Saturday morning. One of the members is a little fragile; didn’t want to her to catch the cold and honestly I wasn’t up to cooking and getting the place picked up. On Friday morning I contacted everybody and re-scheduled. Was still hoping to attend Steve’s celebration in person – tripled masked and standing in the back of the room. Saturday morning I was still too symptomatic so switched to the virtual celebration.
It made me feel a little silly, bowing out of commitments I had made, just because of a cold, and I worried a bit that I was blowing my cold out of proportion, acting like my dad or my was-band. But if pandemic has done anything good, it’s made me realize that I really shouldn’t drag my contagious germs around and expose innocent folks, even if it’s “just a cold”. And I did put on a dressy shirt and earrings for the virtual!
Guess I have a couple more days of laying low and looking up silly sick memes.
How do you take care of yourself when you’re sick?
I read in a family history book recently that my paternal great grandmother was described by her sisters late in her life as having “lost her courage”. The book doesn’t go into detail of what her sisters meant, or what losing her courage looked like. This, after raising twelve children to adulthood and operating a large, successful farm after losing her husband years before. She died in the 1930’s after a long life.
I wrote this Tuesday sitting in the waiting area of the hospital where my best friend was having surgery. We drove here early in the morning from a smaller town about 30 miles away. On the drive to the hospital all the warning and hazard lights on my van dashboard came on, the low battery charge came on, the van lights automatically turned off, and the radio wouldn’t work. We barely had enough power to get to the hospital. I got my friend checked in, and the van and I limped to a nearby car dealership. My courage level was about as low as my battery charge. I got a call about an hour later saying it was the alternator, and they would replace it by the end of the day.
I am strangely anxious about any sort of travel these days. COVID and its isolation, the political climate, war, all seem to have sucked all the courage out of me. I am brave at home, but not so much in unfamiliar territory. I realize I have little to really complain about, and I know I will find the courage to solve what are quite minor problems in the grand scheme of things. Why can’t things just go smoothly?!!
Is courage just a decision we make? How is your courage level these days? Any automotive repair stories to share?
I was in the hospital Wednesday for rotator cuff surgery on my left shoulder. Prognosis for recovery was six weeks in a sling and then a lot of therapy with full recovery taking eight months to a year. Woofda. Could be worse, I could still be milking cows. I think I got pretty lucky, after my dad retired from milking, I milked cows for 14 years and I don’t recall ever missing a milking due to injury. I remember a few times having a stomach bug, and I had to run up to the house to use the bathroom, and then come back and finish milking. And some days I probably moved pretty slow. But I don’t think I missed any milking’s other than random vacation days.
But it turns out my torn tendons were all old enough injuries that they couldn’t pull the tendons back into place. I will only need to wear the sling for two weeks, and then a lot of physical therapy to strengthen the muscles that are still there. And considering prior to Thanksgiving I didn’t know I had any issues, I would expect to be back to where I was then. And perhaps looking at shoulder replacement in 5 to 10 years. Yay! Only two weeks in a sling!
In November 1976, my dad had bunions removed from both feet at the same time. I was 12 years old. Dad hired a guy to come and do chores and milk the cows as Dad was supposed be off his feet for six weeks. That was a year it was cold and there was a lot of snow early in the winter. If I remember right, the guy only lasted a few days or a week, and then he broke the chain on the manure spreader and rather than fixing it, just parked it in the shed and went home. Well, you can’t leave a spreader full of manure sitting in freezing weather; it will freeze solid and we need to use it every day. You have to fix it and get it empty. That may mean unloading it by hand, but it needs to be emptied one way or another. Which Mom and I did. Then Mom and I laid in the snow fixing while dad shouted instructions from the living room window. The guy was fired and mom and I did the milking and chores. And it wasn’t long before dad had bread bags over the casts on his feet and he was back down in the barn. He didn’t really have a choice. I’ve asked my siblings if they remember helping or hearing about this. They don’t. Funny the things we forget or put out of our minds.
Point being: At least I’m not trying to milk cows with one arm.
Here’s a photo of the dogs, Bailey and Humphrey, keeping an eye on a squirrel.
I was / am excited and scared, the shoulder was giving me muscle spasms or something about once a week or so, and they hurt like the dickens, so I hope that will be gone. They did clean up the site and realign some things and I got a balloon in there holding it all in place. And I keep reminding myself, in the long run, this will be nothing. I am still so fortunate.
There’s a farmer on youtube called ‘The Harmless Farmer’, Andy Detwiler. He impresses me with the things he can do with his feet. And we’ve got a friend who’s been dealing with cancer for years. So, a sore shoulder for a few months? One arm in a sling for 2 weeks? This is nothing. Keep the perspective.
What helps keep your perspective?
Help me with fun phrases or stories for the sling:
Trail Baboon 