Me Me Me Meeeee

Since the usual space beat is a bit slow, I thought I'd do an update on life in general.  So, yeah, this is going to be a me me me meeeee post, and I haven't really done one since my surgery back at the end of January.  Let me throw in an update on the rest of life that I haven't talked about since the day before Thanksgiving.  In fact, let me start there. 

While I've never been given a formal diagnosis of Benign-Paroxysmal-Positional-Vertigo, or BPPV, as Aesop and several other folks commented to that post I've assumed that's what it is.  I'm right around three months since the accident that caused it and while the day to day problems are at least an order of magnitude better, they're not quite completely gone.  There are still motions I go through or positions that I get into that cause it more than others, but none of them cause that reflexive eye twitching (nystagmus) that seems like a control loop trying to orient itself by finding horizontal and vertical.  That was pretty much gone by the time of the surgery, Jan. 26, but there's a better story about that I'll get to in a minute. 

The recovery from surgery has gone as well as I could have hoped.  I left the hospital that Friday with a handful of prescriptions, a pain concoction (a seriously revolting tasting syrup - I suspect being intentionally revolting to discourage use), two different medications for spasms in the area, and an anti-nausea drug that Mrs. Graybeard used while getting chemotherapy.  Once or twice, I tried the "use this one first" drug for esophageal spasms since I had some pains that weren't responding to anything but a heating pad, but they didn't respond to that drug either and they went away within another couple of days.  I was completely off the meds within a week of the surgery.  

Part of the advice for the hernia surgery recovery is to eat smaller meals; I quickly found that wasn't optional.  I simply couldn't eat what I was used to.  While it has gotten closer to normal, it's still not quite there, but that's fine.  An element of physical therapy for this repair is to eat; the instructions say a couple of bites every couple of hours.  The hard part there is remembering, because if I'm not hungry, I don't think about eating.

The fun story is that when I woke up from the anesthesia the afternoon of the surgery, I felt less dizzy than I thought I did the day before.  The argument for keeping you overnight is partly to ensure the anesthesia doesn't leave you dizzy and, of course, was something all the nurses wanted to ask me about.  I got some funny looks when I told them I thought I was less dizzy than before the anesthesia.  There are a couple of possible reasons for this; the more likely one is that it's my body's own weird reaction to the anesthesia.  The other is that when I was under the anesthesia, they put my head in a position like the Epley maneuver that's used to treat the BPPV and unintentionally had a positive effect on me.

I had a followup two weeks after surgery (2/9) and was expecting to get the next followup on 2/23, which is an easy date to remember, if nothing else.  Based on how I was doing at the one month followup, it was moved to 3/9.  I'm still restricted to not lifting over 20 pounds, and since I have no idea what a bad outcome of lifting things would look or feel like, I'm respecting that.  Except for carrying my wooden stepladder into this room last week to change a "dead LED" light bulb.  And maybe one or three other little things.

Meanwhile, since I hadn't been able to ride a bike since Thanksgiving, I started riding my indoor trainer right after New Year's.  I took off the two weeks between surgery and the first followup, but since now it's pretty much activity as tolerated, I went back to riding indoors the day after that (Friday the 10th).  I have always found riding indoors horrifically boring, but ignoring that, the questions center on how comfortable I can be riding outdoors.  That's probably going to be a real question in a few weeks.  My balance hasn't been an issue on the indoor trainer, but I can sense it's better now than at the start of January.  Not riding outdoors until my 3/9 checkup is probably prudent.