Tuesday, September 25, 2012

The PT Routine

This is from a recent message Michelle sent to me about her Physical Therapy routine.

1 Ride bike 8 minutes
2 Slanted board leaning into wall hold count of 15 three times
3 Sled; three different exercises
4 Stand on board with a half ball on other side and keep it from tipping from side to side
5 Throw ball onto trampoline while standing on one foot facing front, then sideways on each foot
6 Blue band around ankle stretching facing in four different directions for each ankle
7 Plunging foot into a bucket of rice and moving it in all directions for a minute per foot
8 Picking up marbles with toes, hold for count of three, then place in container
9 Deep massage of ankles - ouch!
10 Ice around both ankles for 20 minutes (think pins and needles); ankles are red when finished, and stiff.
I think that she's doing more stuff, now.  The above, plus somewhat more, over an hour, twice a week.
Many thanks to everyone for their kind wishes.

Monday, September 17, 2012

"have a wonderful life..."

Michelle provided me with notes from today's doctor visit, and they are reproduced below.

Looks really good, especially where he did the surgery.
scar looks good.
very happy with it
good mobility
have a wonderful life
keep the brace in case you do anything on uneven ground

Monday, September 3, 2012

HAPPY LABOR DAY, EVERYONE !!

Short version:  she’s doing well, and getting better, but not as quickly as she would like.
The longer version:  so, now, what is it, 19 May – June – July – August makes how many days? Something over 100. Here we are, on a very nice day in these parts, after an agreeable Labor Day Morning breakfast with Susan (our annual during-DragonCon breakfast event) and just enjoying the weather and the leisure.
Michelle is upstairs, working on a project that I could go into a bit, but there might just actually be some peripheral contact by those personally impacted with the project and, thus, no word of it here, not today.  The 411 on that will come at a later time, and with a much more limited audience.
So, anyway, how’s it going?  I’ll tell you how it’s going.  She’s having a lot of good days, with some of them being better days.  She still only seems to have X number of steps in a day, and we don’t know what that number is.  Some days, it’s a bigger number.  We’re still a long way from making the entire block, but I have high hopes for October with that.
Haven’t written anything in a couple of weeks because there’s not really anything new going on.  She’s got physical therapy twice a week (except for next week because of resource scheduling issues) and does exercises at home every night (most every night). 
We walk the dog together at least once every day, most of the time.  This morning was especially pleasant.  I’d like to think that we’ll do that again at least once today. 
With summer officially and figuratively behind us, it’s in the archives, with some of them preserved here. Not a lot of options for Michelle Summer-just past, but there are high hopes for next summer. 
Our oncoming 30th wedding anniversary looks less likely to involve locational options, what with her burning through all her vacation time to deal with recovery, but I’m hoping that we can work something out to make it a special day.  Still not sure what that could be, but hoping that a unique option will present itself for consideration.  I welcome suggestions from the audience.  As nice as it would be to wake up somewhere special and different on our anniversary, a day trip of some sort might be our only opportunity.  We’ll just have to wait and see how it works out.  She might not be up for a lot of walking around, anyway.  That’s a bit of a damper on revelries.