Sunday, June 12, 2022

Sunday, June 12, 2022

 

   I slept well again. I woke up before six but remained in bed. I have very little to get up for these days. I don't even get to walk Elsa. How does one hold a leash and keep both hands on a walker? Needing to do that creates an obstacle to most activities. Try carrying a plate full of food to the table while maneuvering a walker. Two slices of jam-covered toast wound up jam-side down on my lanai rug. Quite a mess!

   I did some work on the updates and blog. At least I got out the daily blog post. My numbers have increased again. They're up in the 50s with folks from China of all places. From what I read, I doubt there is an English language class in China anymore. 

    Sitting in my old-lady chair proved a challenge. The surgical leg hurts, mostly with sciatic pain. Is this pain temporary due to the swelling in the area, or is it permanent due to the implant putting pressure on the nerve? Only time will tell. I have the words of all three of my body workers telling me I won't be happy with the hip transplant. What have I done?  

   I ran out of hydrocodone pills last night after taking only half a pill every four hours for a day and a half. I was on my own with Tylenol, at least for a day. Monday, I see the surgeon for a checkup. My hip does feel much better. Tomorrow it will be eleven days since the surgery. While I haven't had my hanai sister's problems after her back surgery, I find the aftercare absurdly poor. There is no checklist of procedures. This drop in aftercare quality started when I left the post-op. No, before that. They didn't give me juice and crackers because I was getting a full meal through room service. Well, I guess you could call an all-liquid diet a full meal. Yuck! I would have loved some apricot juice and a cracker. It would have been so much more satisfying.

  But back to more serious deficiencies. While I was told to brush my teeth at least twice a day before surgery, there was no effort from the floor nurses to get me to brush my teeth. I wasn't allowed out of bed until the PT checked to see if I could walk. If I brushed my teeth, it would only be with assistance. No one even mentioned it.  

       And then, there's the whole blood pressure debacle. The nurses may have given me blood pressure medication intravenously while I was in the hospital. I was light-headed when the first PT visit. She didn't allow me to try to walk as a result. No one checked my blood pressure at any point. If I hadn't pulled out the blood pressure monitor recently because of that 174/102 reading I got for my pre-surgical exam, I wouldn't have known how low it was. I would have taken my blood pressure medication as directed. God knows what would have happened. I wondered how many post-surgical falls can be attributed to decreased blood pressure. Some of the falls may have been due to the post-surgical painkillers, but some may be due to the anesthesia still in our systems. As I typed this, the outside of my surgical thigh still felt somewhat numb. 

  I read something startling in Merzenich's Soft-Wired today. Attention is the key to learning in the mature mind. The infant mind has no choice but to process everything that comes in. Depending on the input, it starts pruning the unneeded neurons and connecting sets of neurons, building a coherent world. After a certain point, that uncontrolled intake stops. The conscious mind has to take over, deciding what to attend to. Good learning depends on the conscious mind determining what to attend to. The degree of attention determines the degree of imprint, which amounts to the degree of learning. It means EFFORT is the key to learning. 

   I have always been protective of teachers arguing that students don't do well because they make no effort. The response is punishment, hoping to force students to change their evil ways. For the first time, I reconsidered my point of view. Lack of effort is a problem. As I write, I assume there is an underlying problem if there is a lack of effort. I still think so. I also understand we all like to do what comes easily. That's where pleasure is. We must step out of ourselves, or what we think is ourselves, to learn something new. Change!  

There it is again. Change! How do we learn to deal with that?

   I couldn't sit in my old-lady chair long. I would sit in it for a while and then lie on the sofa. I tried to continue working on the computer from that position, but it was impossible to adjust my glasses so I could see clearly. I gave up and just watched a video of a stand-up comic. A woman named Alice something with a program called Savage who based humor on bad circumstances. I didn't find it funny.

   I forgot to mention something I watched recently, which I highly recommend. Heidi Schreck does a show called "What the Constitution Means to Me." I loved this performance. It was thoughtful and emotionally engaging. It is political. It talks about women's rights and violence in America. 

    Scott came through on his way out. He was going out for Thai food. Did I want anything? No. I had more than enough food. I had texted Lutz a bit earlier to tell him to hold off on his spaghetti for another day while I worked my way through what I had.

   I felt that I wasn't tired and couldn't fall asleep. Lutz came to the door and spoke to me while I lay there. That must have been around 5 pm when he was doing his evening walk. The next thing I knew, I woke up, and it was dark. It was well after 7 pm. I did fall asleep. This twilight zone I was living in was not for me. It made me mad as hell, and I didn't want to take it anymore. Of course, I didn't have much choice if I wanted to heal quickly.