I had another dentist visit

I went to the dentist again for an adjustment, but my lower still hurts my mouth. On the plus side, all the meditation I’m doing to block the pain is having a major effect on my blood pressure, my diastolic is in the 70s and my systolic bounces between the low 100s to above 130 when I get a pain spike. Like I said, pain spikes are daily, but Ibuprofen and meditation lets me deal with it.

Current writing jam and meditation jam is Occam’s Laser – The Divine Trilogy. It’s about 2 hours long, so I don’t get any jarring changes to take me out of my trance.

My other difficulty is getting enough calories in a form I can get through my mouth since I can’t actually chew. I have been eating a lot of oatmeal, ramen, and applesauce and drinking protein shakes. I originally bought the shakes to help Mrs. the Poet get some stuff to heal her skin grafts and maybe put some weight back on, but she can’t handle the soy in them and also the taste turns her off, but I love them. And they help keep my weight from dropping too much as I can’t actually eat until my mouth heals up some more. The biggest problem I’m having besides the lower plate jabbing the inside of my mouth is I’m having a hard time keeping my lips closed as I eat and also using my lips to take the food off my spoon since I can’t use my teeth to do that at the moment.

My dilemma with the lower plate is I need to have it in so my gums are protected from food but I need protection from my denture. It it a conundrum.

And that pretty much covers everything I had to bitch about today.

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Still dealing with the side effects of my Fauci Ouchie

Basically I still have the one finger that was in the worst condition to begin with not working within wear limits. I mean screw tolerances and design specs, I just want to function within wear limits now as in kinda sorta be functional. And it’s not like it is painful, there’s a little discomfort as the limits of travel are neared, but nothing resembling pain. I don’t know if it really doesn’t hurt, or if it doesn’t hurt enough to break through my pain tolerance, because after doing some DIY dentistry I know I have some pretty high pain tolerance.

Other than that nothing important going on around Casa de El Poeta, just the regular banging about and not doing anything interesting. I have been reading some books on my Kindle app, litening to music on my YTM app on my phone, doing general body maintenance on my corpus to prevent it from becoming corpse, and just existing for a while. But you can bet as soon as something interesting happens and I get a chance to park my butt behind a computer to chronicle it, you’ll read about it in this blog.

If I get up and move, I can keep moving

If I can endure that first few minutes after I stand up, I can keep going until I get tired. Honestly, all I have to do is not fall down when the back spasms start and continue for about 5 minutes, then they go away until exhaustion sets in and they start twinging again.

I discovered this when I had to go transfer money back into my checking account after some more delayed payment purchases drained my account below the balance needed to pay another delayed payment I have been keeping track of because it’s a backorder instead of a purchase with a delayed payment. Actually I discovered it when I had my toes done and walked almost a mile home from the nail spa, I just verified it today when I got out to do the transfer at the ATM at my credit union. Moving I was fine, standing not so much, sitting good, going from sitting to not-sitting was really bad because that triggered the spasms.

Other news is Mrs. the Poet went grocery shopping yesterday, her first trip out of the house that wasn’t to our daughter’s house since beginning of March. She was tired, but not exhausted, which was good. Also we did some online checking of sofas because the one we have now is literally falling apart.

And I’m about to face plant in the keyboard again, so this is probably time to put the post and myself to bed.

I do stupid things sometimes

And yesterday was one two of those times. First stupid thing was extending my walk after ordering the hone I needed to install the kingpins and spindles on the axle. The second stupid thing was refusing the ride home after I started hobbling instead of walking. I can barely walk now because of the pain in the balls of my feet. I walked for 4.4 miles last night which is about 2 miles more than normal. Since the end of May I have walked more than 33 miles which averages out to 2 miles a day, and there were days I couldn’t walk because of pop-up showers in the evenings. But there were 2 extra-point check-ins on my mobile game that gave me an extra 70 points for checking in. That’s the equivalent of an extra 14 check-ins over and above the 25 I get per day, so you can see why I would want to get those check-ins. If I grab a bunch of those I will be back in the black for the weekly $1 gift card. Now the smart thing to do would be to catch the bus to the Wendy’s and order fries and drink soda all day while I walk back and forth between the two extra point check-ins and collect 245 points in 8 hours. That’s almost 10 cents! 😀 and right at 2 miles, and I could take the bus home or within 0.4 miles of home.

I have made zero progress on the TGS2 outside of buying the hone, that will be here tomorrow afternoon. Seriously, I can’t even think right now because of the pain. That kinda worries me, because I’m the guy who wrecked his knees and barely felt it, pulled a couple of my own teeth without painkillers, only took a painkiller because they made me on my last operation, and only needed one on the previous operation. Having something hurt this bad must mean I destroyed something. In fact I think I will take a little lie down because my feet hurt so bad.

Nice kid, but he’s sometimes a bit slow on the uptake

In April of 2002 I had an operation to try to repair the damages done to my knee by the wreck after I discovered that I couldn’t stand on the pedals and continue to pedal the bike because something was funky in my knee. During the operation they discovered there was nothing they could do because the torn ligaments had already healed up and couldn’t be shortened back to their original length. They also discovered this was not the first time this had happened as all the ligaments in my knee were covered in scars where they had torn and healed up without surgery.

Last night I finally put π and e together and said “This is why my knees were always sore as a teenager.” When I was in college I was diagnosed with “chondromalacia patellae” which basically means pain in the knee after a couple of falls where I twisted my knee really badly or landed on my kneecap sideways. Too bad it took me 15 years after the operation to figure that one out. I’m sure the Army doctors who were trying to figure out why I was in constant low-grade pain would have loved to know I could tear ligaments and just go “Ow!” and not fall down.

So a mystery 40 years in the making was finally solved. It doesn’t fix my knees, but at least I know why they used to hurt all the time.

Now I know how I’m unkillable, too dumb to know I’m dead (J/K).

Another Monday, another Feed the size of Marvin’s brain

For those who don’t get the reference in the headline, the answer is 42. Knowing the answer precludes you from knowing the exact question, much like in particle physics you can either know the position or the velocity of a sub-atomic particle, but you can’t know both. Damn you Heisenberg!

And I have lived through another weekend. Yay! Some time tonight I’m going to put the lights back on Francis/es and the gallon jug for gas in the bed and go get some gas for the mower so I can mow the lawn tomorrow while I can still walk upright. Most of the lawn still looks good, but the patches around where the ant mounds used to be are getting rather tall so they need to get mowed, therefore the entire lawn needs to get mowed.

I have so many links to stories from north of the (other) border I almost feel like the blog post should be Canuck Witch on a Bicycle. Seriously about ²/₃ of the links that passed filtering were from Canada. And not many were good.

But first Ted survived the fireworks and the frightened Corgi in his lap to deliver today’s Daily Ted. Morning Links: Founding father of BMX found dead in Indio; man fixing bike shot dead by LASD deputies

Update on a wreck in Seattle. Reader report: Update on bicycle rider recovering from Delridge crash

Still in the Pacific NW. Ghost bike commemorates Medford cyclist’s death An OR cyclist got a Ghost Bike from CO cyclists because he got killed in CO.

I don’t know that my brother would have done this for me. State briefs: Abe Kolstad completes cross-country bike trek on brother’s behalf Yeah, I’m reasonably certain my brother would not have done this for me.

Another one of those “cyclists are dangerous” fallacy-filled diatribes from NYC. Cyclists must get on board with NYC safety If only motor vehicles were as “dangerous” as people on bicycles, there would be hundreds fewer deaths and thousands fewer injured each year just in NYC.

And more on what is really dangerous in NYC. [Update] When A Bus Driver Kills A Pedestrian, MTA Union Blames A Streetlight “Hey, I can’t see where I’m going so I will just blast through at more than 3 times the recommended rate and hope I bounce off the big things…” and ignore the little things, like people.

First tale from the snowy wastes. Driver charged after cyclist struck and killed in Milton Some see a drunk driver killing a cyclist. I see inadequate infrastructure that failed to protect that cyclist from the drunk driver. Look at the proportion of cyclists killed by drunk drivers to all drunk driving victims in the Netherlands and compare that to the US and Canada. More Cyclist killed in hit and run in Milton

Motor crime in Jolly Olde. Lorry driver involved in fatal collision with Denbighshire cyclist banned for five years Oh, how will he survive being unable to drive for a full 5 years? /snark

And then there is this idiot. Northampton driver who killed cyclist after sending ‘trivial’ WhatsApp messages while at wheel is jailed Texting at that rate there is no way he could have been navigating any other way than by peripheral vision at best. So when will they be executing him? Prison term of less than 2 years you say? TANJ!

Articles like this one illustrate why the KSI statistic is superior to just counting fatalities. More than 700 cyclists and motorcyclists were killed or injured on Merseyside roads in the last four years

Back to The Great White North for this infrastructure article. How to avoid getting ‘doored’ on your bicycle Where there are bike lanes they put cyclists between a rock and a hard place other wise known as the door zone and the streetcar tracks.

More on bike lanes in the GTA. It’s time bike lanes were installed everywhere Well, not everywhere. You probably don’t need them in residential areas if those areas are properly traffic-calmed. If you wouldn’t let your 8YO play in the street in front of your house, then that street has not been calmed properly. Bike lanes are for the collector streets that run off residential areas or in the shopping and employment areas downtown, with separated bike paths connecting those.

Something most people don’t think about when they ride. Being covered: Who pays in bike-car collisions?

And this is why cyclists are so easy to treat after a wreck. Cyclists push past the pain to stay in the saddle “That broke collarbone only hurts a little” is something I hear all the time from injured cyclists. I honestly do not know of any mode of transport that inures the users against pain as well as cycling does.

And I’m out of links before I ran out of patience. Tomorrow is lawn mowing first, shower second, blogging third, then dinner.

Billed @€0.02, Opus the Poet

Still not ready to deal with the Feed, so an update on my surgery instead

I got sliced and diced yesterday, but I got so dehydrated waiting for my surgery that I got held up from leaving post-op until I was hydrated enough to pass urine which was about 2 hours and 2 liters of water and IV fluids later. As I wrote, part of the issue was I was restricted from food and fluids from midnight before the operation but did not get into the OR until between 1130 and 1145. The last thing I remember was transferring out of the gurney to the operating table and then getting woozy from the pre-op drugs. Next thing I remember is waking up in post-op from the nurse shaking me gently.

Anyway, getting back to the dehydration, I was denied fluids for 12 hours before the operation so that I wouldn’t throw up during the operation, and I was given very dry O2 during the operation that dried me out even more. After the operation I had about 1500 cc of oral fluids (water and coffee) and 500cc of IV fluids and I managed to get a trickle of urine about 2 hours later.

After I got home I had iced tea and water pretty much solid for another 4 hours, until I was passing urine normally. Then I just hung out with my Peeps.

Mrs. the Poet was able to get a good picture of “Chris Christie” after removal.
I should tell you that this doctor does not have small hands, if anything they are larger than normal.

I was told that there would be a dent left behind when Chris was evicted from my neck, but I was not expecting anything like this dent.

That is a friggin huge dent, especially when you compare the “before” shot.

And a lump that large takes a large incision to remove.

With all that the relief in pain was immediate, from about a 2 or 3 to maybe a 1 on the 0-10 scale. And that was with no post-op pain drugs. I was forced to take 1 Hydrocodone after the operation because maybe I would have some pain after the shock of the operation wore off, or the last of the anaesthesia wore off or something like that, but I haven’t needed anything for pain at all. I feel less pain now than I have in months.

The only thing I regret is I will have to miss the Ride of Silence tonight because I can’t let the incision area get sweaty.

PSA, Opus the unkillable badass Poet