I kick my inhaler up for weeks, and what makes the cough go away is dark chocolate.

Well, it's safer than amphetamines.

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As of Monday, I was cleared to ditch the crutches indoors and use just the one on the street. This means I can properly play with Pinuki. I cannot properly express my joy over this.

Current work is unsticking everything that got stuck. The physio was really happy with me on Mon: within ten minutes, I went from unable to lean on that ankle on the balance-cushion to going side-to-side without needing any help balancing. That was when it finally got through to her that I do balance-boards for fun.

But most importantly: can play with Pinuki. And reliably walk while carrying a cup of coffee.

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Today was the first meet with the physio. She was positively delighted over and impressed by my ankle's range of motion (damn near full), as well as with my muscle retention. She wasn't so happy with my pain levels when attempting to use the foot - although that's fixable with naproxen and I'm officially allowed - or with what's apparently a pressure sore on my heel (thing's freakin' painful).

Really this whole thing goes under "How do people who weren't fit to begin with recover from those things." Because I know exactly how fucked I'd've been had I come into this injury without ridic calves, dedicated balance training, and an upper body trained for stamina over explosive force.

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Y'know, I think the modern-day mermaid has been my default icon for as long as I've been on DW or near-so. But given the number of times I reached for KK having shit to unfuck recently, it's only apt.

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This week was a complete mess, so I forgot to tell:

Wednesday we've been to the big-name doc. Other than being very gentle in his communication style - which after the day I had was very needed - he also pronounced the following: he sees no reason for me to have surgery, and he's cleared me to take the aircast off and begin physiotherapy ("As far as I'm concerned you can walk. The rest is between you and your physiotherapist.")

I put the aircast on for high-risk environments like buses but otherwise, it's been off since I took it off in the doc's office. My ankle's slowly recalling how to turn right and left, and I'm working on the disaster the skin of that foot is. I'm also working on desensitizing the foot to touch, as it's gotten completely ridiculous; so far so good on that front - I figure by Monday, the only remaining hypersensitivity will be due to residual swelling and bruising. (Part of the hypersensitivity wasn't just because nothing but a thin sock touched that foot or put pressure on it in a month and a half, but the broken skin. That's responding well to oil and the aloe/borage cream, so.)

Also today tamara_russo was here, so we unfucked my room and specifically my closet - I can't manage it on my own on one leg and my mom is too worn out for the sort of collab this takes - which, after six+ weeks, was pretty a mess: we had to take out two shelves' worth and re-fold them, plus two of the small-items baskets. The mess in the closet was both driving me up the wall and a genuine functional problem, so this is a significant relief.

It's also Pinuki playtime - neither of my parents is physically capable of the sort of play I used to do with Pinuki (and will hopefully soon be able to again), but tamara_russo is aces. She was here last week too, and we're working on learning to read body langauge and play style - after this week it's only fine-tuning, I think, and Pinuki got a half-hour of high-quality, high-energy play. Given he's exceeded his ability to behave through this (the past week he started with destructive/disruptive behaviors he's never had, even as a puppy; yesterday this required a visit to the vet for an emetic to prevent gastric obstruction) and my mom's flat-out in the danger zone, this weekly half-hour is absolutely crucial for the entire household.

Today the weather is genuinely nice for the first time in for-fucking-ever. We had a couple weeks of obnoxious cold - I'm talking 4C nights and 10-12C days - then a hyper-dry week with strong winds. Today is warm enough I shed most of the layers, with reasonable humidity and wind.

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Today's anatomy study is/was "wtf is making my heel go all-around burning-variant pain on even minimal pressure and may be associated with swelling across a specific band."

Current most-likely option is inflamed tendon sheath (yes I know which one, I'll spare you the latin) leading to the above plus a side-order of tarsal tunnel syndrome, aka "My foot is red and swollen, particularly around the toes, and stretching makes it worse." This is likely from the casting rather than the original injury as this specific tendon has fuck-all to do with external-rotation injuries.

My best option seems to be to keep unfucking the Achilles tendon, and figure out how to work a certain subset of calf muscles without upsetting the lateral malleolus.

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More like, "As you're a well-behaved patient you get to have an aircast instead of a plaster cast", "Do another set of x-rays and let's see you again in two weeks" and "It should be another two months before you can step on that foot."

At least the town ortho is genuinely nice.

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So apparently, the single most natural-seeming and flattering blush on me is a touch of each of Coloured Raine's Moments and Gingerbread, which are technically eyeshadows - dark plum-brown and, well, gingerbread. Don't ask, I don't know.

Also, Bdelluim Tools' #956 continues to be the single best buy of a makeup brush I'd ever made. #942 is nice, but - well, really the problem is that #956 is That Awesome.

(Coloured Raine are the absolute best value-per-money eyeshadows. They're excellent regardless of cost - I think the only powder eyeshadows I have that have them beat are Shiseido's and maybe that one Stendhal - and then they also cost 7$ each.)

(Also St. Germaine Cocktail is every bit as pretty as I thought it would be, and I'm so glad I went for it and not any of the other golds. It looks on skin pretty much the way ABH's 10K looks in the pan, though judging from swatches I think it'll have less presence on lighter skins.)

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My mom, Pinuki and I are having אס"ק about the cast.

Odds are right now Israelis are laughing hysterically while everyone else is "Bwuh?", so I'll try to explain.

אס"ק, pronounced AH-sak, is acronym for "end-of-training atmosphere". It's military acronym for the sort of batshit that takes over everyone, staff included, near the end of a training period. Any training period, but most specifically the ones that have distance-smashing or something else major at the end, particularly long ones, or both. It's a special sort of batshit that doesn't really have a civilian equivalent - no, end of high school or college are not even close, trust me. The way teachers/profs. will sometimes go "Whatever" is sort of of the same kind (or, well, one of the kinds typically involved in assak), but nowhere near the same order of magnitude.

Assak is a very, very special kind of crazy. The core of it is that there's this period that's really Intense and Demanding and Very Rigid, it puts serious pressure on the people managing and enforcing it as much as the people surviving within it, and there isn't a fundamental difference of interests between the two groups (or sometimes the enforcing party is abstract, rules you need to adhere to for some reason but not actually people, and again: the reason for the rigidity and demandingness is not fundamentally against you).

Which is how having a cast for a month can have assak. The first week is not so bad, week 2 starts getting annoying, week 3 is even worse, then you can smell the end of it and -

- and that when (if you're seasoned) you give up, acknowledge the Batshit, and just try to ride it out.

Even if your 35kg hyper-clingy trickster of a Malinois mix smells the assak, too.

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Sunday was the visit to the ortho outpatient clinic with the CT scan results. This time the wait was positively obnoxious, but it was worth it for a young doc who's excellent at communication skills. (Where "young" is of relevant definition for someone who finished their residency, so mid-30s at a minimum.)

I have two fractures, one in the medial and one in the posterior malleolus. The latter is the one that hasn't moved at all. The former is the more significant, and it did move out of place - into the joint. This is the problem one, as it's 50/50 on whether or not I'd benefit from surgery. Conservative treatment (that is, no surgery) comes with a risk of cartilage atrophy and other such fun things. Surgery comes with the risks of - well - general anesthesia, sawing a bone open and putting a plate inside.

And so the official rec I got is to get a second opinion. Yeah.

That said, the odds of arranging surgery before the date at which it's okay to remove the cast are nil (and that's to say nothing of thinking things over), so I have a date set for getting rid of the damn cast next week. This can be done at the town clinic, thank goodness.

(My mom was concerned about the ER doc having only requested regular x-ray and IDed only one fracture. The latest doc eventually managed to get it through her head that IDing only one fracture is what could be done with the regular x-rays, and that going straight for CT is just not protocol. If things went off-track it's in that we only managed to get the first follow-up two weeks after the fracture instead of one, but I don't think that would've made a difference.)

The bruise on the top of my foot is still there, and still very blue. The toes are still swollen, if less. It's no doubt going to be interesting next week: scratch physiotherapy, I don't know how I'd be getting that foot in a shoe, or even a sock.

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Had you asked me at most points on Tue, I'd've said the day was going good-to-great. I mean, yeah, I had pain-nausea when we finally reached the sea-end of Hertzliya and I hit the low end of panic after several hours in that basement alcove that's the radiology floor, but I got fucking fantastic lunch, time in the sun and sea-view (on a particularly gorgeous day) out of it.

Then I spent the next two days recovering. Wed also had the sort of pain and misery I haven't had since the first few days after the accident, too.

A digital version of the raw results, we got then and there. (Well, after a half-hour wait or so.) Today the prelim interpretation arrived. It says fuck-all about soft tissues, which I'm pretty sure is a good thing; confirms the actual joint-surface is fine; and that the fracture that had the last doc worried is perfectly places. The main fracture - that'd be the Weber B - is apparently slightly off-place; I'm not sure how much of a problem that is, but I should find out on Sunday.

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The theme of this week is "Getting fed the fuck up with this shit". And being liberal with the naproxen, because not only am I dealing with the sore-everyting that comes with the current situation, but I also got my period.

(That was a disaster we won't speak of. I didn't take naproxen the first night, and then I also had bleeding like I haven't since middle school, and I'm rarely stable on the crutches when I just get up from bed and it's way worse in the middle of the night rather than morning. So yeah. I didn't fall and nothing was ruined, which are the only reasons this rates below waking up in the middle of the night with a fever-type high-end stomach bug.)

Yesterday was the outclinic check-up. It was... well, let's put it this way: I had dealt with military orthopedists, and yesterday's doc either tied with or exceeded the record set by the worst of that lot. As in, yesterday I did a couple phones to figure out who should I be mailing my for-the-record complaint to, and as I need to fax the thing it'll have to wait a bit, but it'll happen.

The one thing that doc could do other than irritate me to the point of deliberately causing a scene (when dealing with shit authoritarians in positions of power, create a fucking scene; odds are they don't want attention drawn to their fuckery and will dial it back so you dial the volume down) is read x-rays. Which is why I'll be doing a CT on Tuesday, because he thinks there's a total of 3 breaks there. (I didn't manage to get a solid answer from him on why is this fucking needed - as there's no indication I need ORIF surgery - but as I need to do some sort of imaging at this point and it's my ankle, not anything seriously radiation-sensitive, then hey, whatever, I'm not the one paying for it and it's not fucking MRI, so it's not worth the argument. Besides which, curiosity.)

Of the two newly-discovered fractures - I had him talk me through the x-rays - one is also in the lateral malleolus and the other is in the talus, where the deltoid ligament connects. That second one is the other reason I didn't put up a fight over the fucking CT once I got the fucking information: I did enough reading to know that even with hypermobility and the muscles to support it, the odds I came out of this without any damage to the deltoid are low - and that the ankle being one of my least-stable-to-begin-with joints (reason I have those muscles over there), this is not something I want to fuck with.

I'm fairly certain the deltoid itself is fine: I had enough soft-tissue injuries I can fucking tell those things, let alone when I had two weeks of safe-conditions-experimenting. But there's a chance the anchoring of it got disrupted, and there's no words for how much I don't want to fuck with that.

(Which I wouldn't have known if I depended on that doc to explain things to me! Which: I get docs not explaining this sort of a thing to begin with. Most people would get their eyes crossed. BUT, this doc started from not even explaining why he wants a CT, and he didn't - until the end of the meeting where I all but forced him to - actually look at my leg, let alone ask about my medical history. Which is relevant, because overall-subclinical hypermobility can still be clinical for specific joints.)

(The above is not all of the outrageousness, but I don't want to talk about any of that.)

Whiiiiiich puts me at pronation-abduction fracture. Which honestly makes the most sense given what I know of my motion patterns. Which, hilariously, the epic bruise on top of my foot is not from said foot breaking, but rather from having all the weight of my body slam there against the shoe. (Still no bruises anywhere else, which means they didn't happen. I fell face-first into packed-dirt and gravel with no control over my body, so yeah: all of that impact had to go somewhere.)

(Can you TELL how frustrated I am with no doc asking me about that sort of detail? The ER doc I understand, but yesterday's? Ugh.)

Speaking of, the pins-and-needles and the tight-bright-red from the oedema are driving me up the wall. Today is the first there's been a sign of those going down. (The swelling and the coloration have been showing visible daily improvement from the day after the bruise hit full form, but this is the first that the neuro symptoms improve.)

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As I forgot to mention that.

And they're going to stay open until... whenever I get to the comp on Tue, really.

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Today went rather well until Pinuki made a sudden and particularly powerful pull while I was mid-step on a path of the bad mud. I slipped, fell sideways, and was mostly grateful my glasses and my face came out intact. (And dismayed. Quite dismayed.)

Then I tried to get up.

I managed to limp some 10, maybe 15m. I realized it was a horrible idea partway through, but had to keep going until I found something I could sit on. Then I called my mom, who was the one who figured out calling AM - who had to piggyback me out of there. (Good thing he's That Tall, and doesn't mind taking his tiny car to the edge of a literal cliff.)

I don't think it occurred to me I had nausea and cold sweat from the pain of moving on this leg; I thought it was combo having suddenly stopped moving after a long brisk walk in the cold, having not eaten well today, and shock. I did figure it out by the time we dropped Pinuki at home, moved me to my mom's car and were on the way to the emerg clinic - but I still thought it was a sprain.

I only started cluing in to something being Weird when the orthopedist poked at my calf and foot, and with the exception of the one point - which was all bone - nothing hurt. It was only a while later, after I got myself on the bed in the x-ray room at the ER-proper (to which the emerg-clinic doc sent us), that I properly realized that, yeah: this behaves as if I cracked that bone.

Then came the wait: up until that point we didn't have to wait more than a few minutes at any given stop, but we waited outside the orthopedy ER for a good number of hours. When we did get to the doc she was lovely, though, and the process of constructing the cast didn't hurt at all (which I was afraid of). One more round to x-rays to be sure the pose is good (the doc really liked what this second set looks like), and finally off home.

Where I had to get past an obnoxious number of stairs to actually get home, then made a walker out of a porch-chair until we can get me proper sticks. (I'd say the reduced mobility is the part I'm doing best with, but really that's the pain.)

But yeah. I kinda broke my ankle.

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Pinuki has a choice in bedding.

He's most likely to curl up on the bed when it's either the cotton-jersey set that's the next thing to flannel (not as fluffy, but way nicer to the touch) or the cotton that's just that fine-thread and densely-woven.

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My crook of a dog just lifted a pair of pants to see if I hid socks under them, and was disappointed to find out I didn't. (I do not get to keep clothes-worn-once-that-don't-need-laundry outside the closet. I do not get to keep shoes exposed at a height less than my head.)

Also I became that person who'll walk her dog at 12C and pouring rain, after dark, like, "What? He still needs to walk, and we both have the gear for it."

And someone around here must have a fireplace that's not gas, because there was the sweet smell of wood-smoke to go with the wet pines.

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On Wednesday, my mom felt unwell. By Thu morning, it became the bronchitis from hell, complete with fever and the works. Friday, my dad started coughing - though today the doc said he has it relatively easy (he has the worst cough in the house). Yesterday, I ended up doing a controlled fall trying to get something from the wardrobe, because guess who got sick, too. (Though I got lucky: it seems to be just a standard cold, for all that my energy/stamina are in the red.)

It's 16C at midday outside, raining intermittently, and the dog still needs to be walked.

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( 18-26 Oct. Fun shopping and social stuff, not-so-fun antihistamine intolerance stuff.Collapse )

Nov. 01, winter made like it's arriving for a day. Nov. 02 (another Wed) tamara_russo and I met at Tel Aviv, but the traffic was a real special hell: I got stuck on the way to KS for about an hour because there was a massive accident at Eyal interchange, then 149 skipped a line for no reason - or took too long, or both, fuck if I remember. We did find a nice tiny sushi place at the corner of Dizengoff and one of the avenues, but - right, that was the day 149 on the way back took over two hours, wasn't it? I arrived home something like three hours later than intended. That was unfun was all involved.

( 12-18 Nov., AKA Hell Week. #1, because this week's earning that also.Collapse )

I have it marked that on Wed the 23rd my mom's been with Pinuki at the internist vet, but I don't remember what that was for. Possibly - probably - follow-up to the stomach thing.

When the eastern winds stopped (~25 Nov) - well, it was definitely before Tue the 29th, because that was the day I spent about two hours on pharmacy/groceries/fuel. It also means winter wasn't yet awful that day, but it was definitely wet, raining and that much colder the day after that. It's still cold with significant rain, though the latter is occasionally taking a day or two off; the mud isn't that awful yet.

This post started 12:55; it's now 14:20, but unpacking groceries and feeding Pinuki also happened.

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Today, my supposedly-smart dog stole the salt shaker. Said salt shaker is indeed quite visually pleasing, but it must be quite uncomfortable to hold in one's mouth and I'm fairly certain the plastic doesn't absorb scent (he'll often as not fall asleep with his nose in something I wear), so I've got nothing.

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Next time any idiot pulls out the supposed Native American/Palestinian supposed parallel, a comparison of DAPL versus setting natural forest and human habitats on fire should fucking suffice.

(+70k evac'ed, of these a fair number of assisted living/nursing facilities.)

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