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Posts Tagged ‘personal’

The Littlest Blue-with-Black-Stripe Belt Goes Back to Class (with bonus gimpy feet)

I thought I’d be out of karate for two months following the surgery, but my orthopedist and physical therapist both said I could go back sooner, provided I wore the brace and paid close attention to what my ankle had to say. Fortunately, after thirteen years of ballet and other dance training, I am very good at listening to my feet.

So yesterday I returned to class, and god, was it a relief. Seeing people, stretching, getting some exercise . . . and it turned out better than I expected, actually. There are things I can’t do: jumping, for example. And my balance on that foot is very sketchy right now, so kicks are kind of off the menu (of course the senpai running the warm-up chose to do a kick combination across the floor that day). But the only thing really interfering with my ability to move is that I can’t pivot sharply; ask me to move from a left-hand punch to a right-hand one and I’m fine, but reverse the order and I have to just kind of mark it. It’s bloody hard to do sharp movements with the upper half of your body and cautious ones with the lower half, especially when you’ve been working and working and working at integrating your whole body rather than moving in parts.

Kumite (sparring) is still way in my future, but at least I can do kata, cautiously. As I said to several people, even if I could only do 40% of the work, that’s still a lot more than the 0% I had before. And it turns out I can do more than 40%. This makes me very pleased indeed.

in which the gimpy feet begin to ungimp

Went for a walk around the neighborhood today. Partly because, although I don’t want to court skin cancer, I’m a little appalled at how pasty I’ve gotten; it means I’ve spent too much time indoors. Partly because yesterday a trip to the Stanford library (which requires a moderate bit of walking) was way more exhausting than it should have been, and if I’m going to walk around London again, I need to get me some endurance back.

Thursday was my first physical therapy appointment. The woman tested strength and range of motion on my left foot (for a baseline) and then on my right, and we talked about the ancillary problems I’ve got aside from the surgical recovery — collapsing arches, plantar fascitis, metatarsalphalangeal sprain (say that one five times fast), and some mechanics issues of long standing, to whit, my extremely limited range of dorsiflexion. For the time being, my primary assignment is to stretch out all the muscles stiffened by my time in the boot; to that end, I’m actually not wearing the brace all the time, because it would just continue restricting my range of motion. Plus it presses on one of the two incisions in a moderately uncomfortable way, which is less than ideal.

The orthopedist cleared me to start biking again, though he advised wearing the brace. I’ll probably give that a few days more before I try it, but the idea appeals. It gets me out in the sun (which we’re finally getting a bit of), and helps regain what endurance I had, and I can accomplish some errands in the bargain. All good stuff.

In the meantime, I sit around and make faces while I point my toes. I will get this mobility back; it’ll just take some time and mild suffering. But that’s okay by me.

I tell ya, my brain . . . .

I rarely remember my dreams, but I know that last night my brain decided it should mash together the two big things sitting around in it. Which is how I ended up trying to find my orthopedist’s office in the V&A.

I don’t know; I just work here.

Speaking of work, time to finish Eliza’s adventures in Regent Street and get to the bit where Special Branch is breathing down her neck.

Freeeeeeeedommmmmmmm!

BRACE!!!

Ahem. That is to say, I have achieved Early Release from the boot (the four weeks will be up on Friday), and am now back to the ankle brace I was wearing prior to surgery.

Man, I had really grown to hate this thing in March. Now? It’s my bestest friend. Because it isn’t the boot.

I’m sitting here in my jeans — jeans!!! I haven’t worn these things for almost a month!!! — and I could put on a second shoe if I really wanted to, and I could also drive, or walk to the bank to deposit checks, though I’m not going to do that because it would be really easy to overdo this. I’ve already discovered that we’ll still be going down stairs the two-feet-on-one-step method for a while; trying to walk down them normally produced a twinge that said clearly, you’re not ready for this yet. Okay. Fair enough. Heck, I still feel off-kilter after (nearly) four weeks of having my right foot be higher than my left. Standing flat feels like my left leg is now longer than my right.

Physical therapy starts Thursday. I am very much looking forward to it.

in which I blame the gimpy feet

I’ve reached this weird point of procrastination, where I feel like I’m putting off practically everything until I get out of this damned boot. Folding laundry? I can do it later. Cooking anything? We’ll get back to that in a week or so. Research reading? I have no idea how I manage to blame this one on my foot, but I do. Everything can wait until I’m more mobile again.

So if you haven’t gotten a reply to some e-mail or LJ comment, blame my foot. It’s what I’m doing.

Things I am looking forward to, once I’m out of the boot:

  • Wearing two shoes again.
  • Wearing something other than sweatpants.
  • Carrying things down the stairs without worrying that full hands will compromise my already-compromised balance badly enough for me to fall.
  • Taking a shower without being paralyzed by an utterly irrational fear that I will somehow, against all odds, contrive to slip and fall and rip the ligament apart again.
  • Driving.
  • Physical therapy.

Yes, I really am looking forward to physical therapy. Because it’s something I can do, beyond just waiting. As I said after the surgery, this is the boring stage; I’m eager to get on to the stage that involves active progress, even if it’s tedious and/or painful to do.

my problem

Everything I think of that’s plausible enough to be a convincing April Fool’s Day prank is also something I don’t want to joke about. Like, I could tell you I slipped in the shower last night and ripped out the stitches that are holding my ligament in place so I’m headed back to the hospital today for another surgery — but dude, NOT FUNNY. And if I can’t amuse myself with a joke, what’s the point?

I hope you all are having fun fooling each other today, though.

someone who understands me!

From ellen_kushner, a fabulous website on the topic of long hair. And by “long,” I mean that my own hair (down to about my hips) is maybe on the short side for what she’s talking about. It’s a great site overall, with very common-sense advice for many types of hair (not just long straight Caucasian hair like mine), but what I love it for is this page, with various possibilities only marginally more complicated than my usual braid, and more interesting to boot.

Much of the long-hair advice is stuff I’ve been doing anyway — I don’t wash my hair every day (I don’t need to), I wear it in a braid (though not up) almost all the time, I don’t use a blow-dryer or curling iron or coloring products or anything else of the sort. I’ll probably try some of the other tips, though, especially since they’re generally in the vein of less maintenance rather than more. My hair is long enough already for my taste, but I wouldn’t mind making it even healthier for its length.

I feel like a dork.

See, okay — I’ve known for a while that it would greatly simplify my record-keeping if I had a dedicated credit card for business-related purchases. And what with these research trips to London, a decent number of those purchases are made overseas. And, well, the terms this card offers for such things are actually pretty good.

So I’ve just applied for a <snooty tone> Harvard Alumni credit card. </snooty tone>

I mocked kniedzw for getting one; now I’m eating my words. But I’m still going to feel like a giant dork the first hundred times I whip it out to pay for anything.

Edited for userpic change: Because really, if I’m going to do the snooty tone, I need the image to go with it.

ankle update

Surgery at the end of March, after ICFA (which means I can swim in the pool there, yay!) Between now and then, I make friends with Mr. Brace, who is my best guard against sudden catastrophic ankle failure.

Not that I think such a thing is likely to happen — but you really, really don’t want to be proven wrong about something like that.

Sadly, I must also swear off kumite (sparring) between now and my recovery, since it occurred to me that probably falls under the umbrella of “basketball and other activities involving sudden changes of motion, especially lateral ones” that I was told would be hazardous. Since I’m supposed to wait until twelve weeks after surgery to do those things (I can go back to karate after eight), that means I won’t be sparring again until mid-June at the earliest.

Well, at least my kata will get really good.

Son of a *bitch*.

I find myself reluctant to post about this, as I have several friends right now dealing with medical complaints of a much more serious nature. But I also know those friends would tell me that their difficulties do not mean I should somehow be happy about my own, and I’m going to have to bring this up sooner or later. So:

I’m having ankle surgery.

Again.

Details within.

email outage

If you’re accustomed to contacting me via my personal e-mail address (i.e. NOT the Gmail one), then there will be a delay in my responses. A small-plane crash, of all things, has taken out power to the server in question, and until that issue is resolved, I will be incommunicado.

(This also includes replies to LJ posts or comments, since that’s where my notifications are sent.)

If you really need to get ahold of me asap, marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com will still work.

medical query, of a physical therapy sort

The arches of my feet are popping again.

Used to be they did this every morning, when I got out of bed. Not always both; sometimes not even one; but popping arches were a fact of life. I’d usually push my foot over the tops of my toes to get it out of the way — a habit left over from ballet. I’d noticed they weren’t doing it as much anymore, but hadn’t really paused to consider the cause.

Turns out my arches1 have started collapsing.

Oddly, this is good news, in a way. Good because the major palpable symptom of this (since I can’t look at my own feet from behind) has been pain in my right ankle, which could also theoretically have been related to the osteochondritis dissecans I had when I was nine. The x-ray showed something indistinct, and if my pain doesn’t clear up we’ll go for an MRI to see what’s happening there, but for the time being the answer is “orthotics” rather than “surgery and six weeks on crutches.” Which I’m grateful for. Been there, done that, don’t want to go back.

So here’s the query part of the whole thing. When my doctor (a general practitioner) explained that my tibialis posterior2 (the muscle-and-tendon set running down the inside of your ankle to the arch of your foot) is weakening/strained, I immediately asked if there were exercises I could do to strengthen it. He said no. Which I frankly don’t buy. We’re talking muscles and tendons, here; even if I somehow can’t work directly on the correct bit, surely I can derive some benefit from strengthening things around them. I have resistance bands; would it help to work with one of those, maybe by pointing my foot inward? How about the thing where you scrunch up a towel with your toes? I’ve got custom insoles now to prop my feet back up to their accustomed shape, but I don’t want to rely on those; I want my arches to be strong enough on their own.

Advice appreciated. I may end up seeing a physical therapist for this, but for the time being I figured I’d ask the Great LJ Overmind.

Edited for clarity: I’m interpreting the popping thing as a sign that the insoles are doing their work; I’ve been wearing shoes around the house, instead of my usual barefoot habits, to hasten what improvement I might get. The lack of popping seems to have been a sign of collapse. Looking back at my post, this was not entirely clear in my original phrasing.

1 When the guy who custom-molds insoles to people’s feet for a living says “wow, you have really high arches . . . yeah.
2 I’m pretty sure that’s the one he named. Wikipedia seems to confirm my guess, but do correct me if I’m wrong.

The Inscrutable Box

I have a Thing on my desk.

I’m a little afraid of it.

Courtesy of my brother, I have finally joined the twenty-first century, replacing my printer (pair of printers, actually) with an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax machine. With document feeder, even. It has doors in odd places and buttons all over, and I’ve dealt with printers for many years now but I’m not entirely sure where to stick the paper in this Thing, let alone do anything else.

(Yes, I’m exaggerating a little bit. But I keep looking at this Thing, and my brain keeps refusing to recognize it as a printer, because it doesn’t look like Printers Should Look. It’s going to take a while to adjust.)

Off to read the manual, I guess . . . .

begin as you mean to go on

So far today, I have eaten cinnamon rolls, done some leisurely prep for the game I’m going to run this year, visited with my brother and sister-in-law, watched TV with my husband, read (part of) a book, and taken a blissfully hot shower. In a few moments I’ll take some experimental pokes at “And Blow Them at the Moon,” which I was going to try to finish by the end of the year, until I noticed that having such a goal was really just a piece of self-imposed and unnecessary stress. So instead it will be the thing I start my year with — aside from the tail end of my copy-edits, which I’ll polish off this weekend.

As someone who firmly believes in the power of symbolic acts, I approve of the way my year has begun.

edit: AND I FOUND MY WATCH! Which has been missing since before Christmas. I’d stuffed it in the pocket of my bathrobe, which I haven’t worn in a while. Hallelujah!

an everything update

Back from India. I definitely need to post pictures and thoughts eventually, but I’m not sure when I’m going to do it, because of the rest of this post . . . .

World Fantasy is this weekend. If you’re going to be there, you can find me at the big autograph session, or at the “Bad Food, Bad Clothes, and Bad Breath” panel on Sunday at 11 (the topic being the grittier and less-pleasant side of premodern life).

I will also be at the second group signing at Borderlands Books on Monday night. Assuming, of course, that I don’t end up eaten alive by my Very First Jury Duty that day.

Aaaaaaalmost done with book revisions. I pretty much finished before I left for India, so I could let the book sit and then tweak anything else needing tweaking. Well, kittens, it’s time for some tweaking. But that needs to get done before World Fantasy, so I can send the book off to my editor.

And then there are some projects I intend to dive into as soon as that’s done with. More on those later.

In other news, a new interview with me has gone live at I Am Write, where (among other things) I talk about how the Onyx Court books were almost an all-folklore extravaganza instead of focusing on faeries.

Now I need to convince myself not to crawl back into bed (curse you, jet lag!), but rather to knock some of these things off my to-do list. I haven’t been reading LJ at all in my absence, so if you or anyone else posted anything I should see, let me know . . . .

more squishiness

My (elder and only) brother got married on Saturday, to a woman who is very literally kickass — as in, she’s one of the sensei at the dojo kniedzw and I go to.

Many congratulations to them both.

Before the day is over . . .

. . . I need to be squish-tastic and mention that this is my second anniversary. And my husband is still as awesome as he was when I married him. (Also as awesome as he was during the eight and a half years prior to our wedding — yeah, we took a long time to get married.)

(I don’t know how awesome he was before that. You’d have to ask other people.)

So yeah. Much love to kniedzw.

Birthday egotism, 2009 edition.

There’s a tradition in my life I failed to uphold last year, because the moving truck had just shown up in California with our belongings, but I think the decision to skip it was a mistake.

See, there are some things I’m very good at — like being self-critical. Veryvery good at that one. Possibly too good. I’m not so very good at enjoying my own accomplishments without constantly dwelling on “but it didn’t turn out quite as well as I hoped” or “okay, I’ve done A, but not B, C, and D.”

Some years ago I found myself having kind of a crummy birthday, the sort where you dwell morosely on another year gone by without much to show for it. To counteract that gloom, I wrote up an LJ post listing every skill and accomplishment I possessed — and I forbade myself to qualify or belittle or play down any of them. Only good stuff, with nary a negative word. I made myself shove my ego into the spotlight, because sometimes, that’s really what your psyche needs.

I’ve done that every birthday since, except last year. So here’s what I’ve done in the last two years, that I can be proud of.

I’m twenty-nine years old today, and what do I have to show for it?

This.