Wednesday, July 13, 2022

 Wednesday, July 13, 2022

 

I woke up in a good mood. I didn’t need the walking stick as I walked Elsa. I  already saw a big difference yesterday. Could Katie’s words, assuring me that I not just doing well for my age but better than many people half my age, have changed my mood? I had been worrying I wasn’t doing well. Everyone said the recovery from THR is supposed to be easy. I still couldn’t do what I could before the surgery. I didn’t have less pain than before the surgery, but it wasn’t much then, either.

  I meditated for an hour and then lay down for a nap. I wasn’t very tired. I read for a while from What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo. She wrote about her Complex-PTSD caused by years of abuse and abandonment. While I may suffer from something comparable, my abuse was nowhere near what she experienced; it was just often and intense. My sister saw my mother as excitable. Maybe that’s all she experienced. I experienced my mother’s reactions like cattle prod shocks. Was she different with me than she was with her? We will never know. We do know I responded differently. After I posted the public blog entry for July 13, 2021, I attacked the NY Times Wordle puzzle. I broke my winning streak for the second time yesterday. The last time I did that, I got down and didn’t do the puzzle for a while. I had to force myself ‘to get back on the horse.’  I did with no dire consequences. Today, I did poorly on the NY Times Crossword puzzle and took it badly. Merzenich’s words warning about the decaying mind of the elderly rang in my ears. Damn! His message isn’t all negative. He does say if we work to maintain our bodies and minds, we can. It just takes work, lots of intentional work-no resting on our laurels, however grand they may have been.

  I only had Adolescent D today at 2 pm. He did surprisingly well yesterday. We continued working on his missed words on the basic sight word list his other tutor left me. D chose to do this exercise. Today he said he had read since our last session. He read everything he came across. It wasn’t ten pages of a book, but his reading anything independently is an improvement. I warned him he might not do as well on the word list next time. However, if he could do it once, it meant his mind was capable of it and could improve.

    He did as well today. He didn’t get every word correctly, but he remembered more and worked on decoding more systematically. He attended in a way he never had before. I always felt he was dragging himself rather than giving the activity his all. It was the first time I had reason to hope he would become a competent reader.