Milestones

Happy turtles; Allan Gardens greenhouse, August 30, 2016

The toe incident:  I think I dislocated rather than broke my baby toe on August 22. Although I feared the worst, the toe has not added to my pain. I keep it immobilized with medical tape. It does not bother me. That's just the first piece of good news. 

Stairs: for the first week post-surgery, I used both hands and a cane to make it up and down the stairs, one step at a time. Twice in one day was a major accomplishment. I could carry some things - a water bottle, books and electronic devices - in a bag slung over my shoulder. I ate at the counter if no one was around to carry my food to the table for me. Now I go up and down stairs without the cane - still one step at a time, but now so many times a day I don't bother to count. I now have one hand free, so I can carry things without a bag. I eat at the table, even when I'm on my own.

Walking: For moving around inside, I stopped using the walker after August 23. I have a mummy-like lurch in my gait.  By Monday August 29, I was lurching with my cane outside: first 300 metres (to the corner), then 400 (to the Allan Gardens), then 600 (to my doctor's office) and now 850 (around the block). I tried to do the 850 metre lurch three times yesterday - but that was too much. 

Cooking: On Wednesday, August 24, seven days after surgery, making a salad for lunch exhausted me. Yesterday, Friday, September 2, I made for supper pork shoulder braised with onions in beer with honey and dijon mustard, basmati rice and a fresh summer tomato and peach salad. Bruce is very happy.

Pain: I reacted badly to the pain killers in the hospital -- severe nausea and dizziness. So I stopped taking them after the first day and a half. The lingering effect of just thirty six hours on the opiates is that I even now have not quite got my appetite back, and feel faintly nauseous and dizzy after meals. The only pain I feel, easily controlled with Tylenol, is when I overdo my physiotherapy (see note on walking too much, above). As for the pain I was in before the surgery: the pain that shot down the inside of my leg, the pain that pulsed at night and made it impossible to sleep, the pain that overcame me if I walked further than 100 metres .... that's all gone.

The next milestone in my recovery is my appointment at Toronto Rehab on September 6. They'll do an assessment, tell me if I need to return to them and provide some counselling.  

I feel like I'm making good progress. Let's see if we can say the same for our friend the Ruler and her Advisors.

******************

The Ruler of a small but pleasant realm was in her chambers meeting for the umpteenth time that week with her most skilled improvisor, the Wizard, and the Wordsmiths, the people in charge of all the NITs (necessary and important terms) in the realm.

Their topic of conversation was as always the Thing, the half-groundhog, half crow hybrid that was the apple of the Emperor's eye.

The week before, they had chanced to discover that the Thing ate money. Since then, they had been feeding it different coins of the realm.

Trial and error had led them to a diet that seemed to please the Thing, kept it thriving, but did not cause it to grow too much: ten copper pennies for breakfast, two silver dimes for lunch and one small (one 20th ounce) gold coin for supper.

Fed these coins, the Thing had grown to about one and a half times its original size. Each meal would make it sing a short sweet song reminiscent of flute music. Once it had metabolized the metal it ate, the Thing would squeeze out from the end furthest from its mouth a small alloy ingot that, though comprised of almost equal amounts of what it consumed, it would shun and try to bury under the papers lining its cage. 

The Wizard rigged an ingenious device that fished out the ingots, melted them down, separated the different metals and stamped new coins.

"The net loss is just under one percent," reported the Wizard at the meeting, "The Thing costs almost nothing to feed. 

"The magic startup is a little costly," he averred,"but we should be able to recoup that over time if we can get the Thing to do more than just eat, sing and poop.

"It's supposed to be a digger," the Wizard went on, "but it will never dig in that cage. We need to take it outside."

The Wordsmiths started at this suggestion. 

"You'll wreck everything if you do that," said Hank, the most senior Wordsmith.

"Hank," snapped the Ruler, never patient with these people for long, "your riddles weary me.  What are you talking about, wreck everything?"

"I mean this," said Hank, "What you have here is a fresh new image for the kingdom. Our artists are working right now to create an appealing public persona for the Thing. We're thinking Pokemon. It's a natural.

"And we can use the noise the Thing makes as a new national song.

"We've got the makings of a great new brand here. You don't want to blow it by taking that Thing outside and letting people actually see it."

To be continued ....

Thanks for reading!

Have a great long weekend!

Karen