Moon Day Thing, 11/21/22

I'm back. What did I miss?

Hey everyone! Boy, it sure feels like I was gone a long time.

Did anything happen while I was recovering?

Nah, I’m just fucking with you. I’ve had basically nothing to do but read and watch everything I could reach from bed.

Enough pictures of search results from “cia fact book usa,¹” let’s get to it.

• 2 weeks ago today, I had my ACL surgery. I was given a nerve block which paralyzed my leg (and most of the other one, apparently) for about a day, which was distressing. I learned that this was primarily to prevent absolutely staggering amounts of pain that couldn’t be addressed by meds, because when I woke up the morning the nerve block wore off, I was delighted to begin being able to move my foot, then my calf, and so on over the next few hours, but this delight was quickly replaced by just completely consciousness-shattering pain while (apparently) the hospital, insurance company, and CVS went back and forth no less than three times to discuss whether oxycodone is right for me in light of the Opioid Crisis(tm). Apparently, it’s even harder to get prescription painkillers than it is to… count votes, I guess.

• My leg was covered in thick bandages for about 3 days because the holes in the sides of my leg where they drilled and shoved stuff in there were weeping. When they came out, there were sutures that stuck around for about a week that were sharp-edged, hard, and stabby (gross pictures ahead).

  

  

  

  I guess I’ve technically participated in the “feet pics” craze now! Damn, I’m cool!

• I was using a walker and crutches for about the first 5 days, but mostly any upright movement was too painful to bother with unless absolutely necessary. We’re talking belly-crawls across the floor and stairs to go to the bathroom. I was conscious for maybe 8 hour a day, a lot of it zonked on oxy. Once I was able to start standing on the leg, I stopped taking the oxy except for going to sleep at night, so my supply would last longer- because falling asleep remains a major challenge without it.

• I started rehab immediately at a good physical therapy place nearby. Once I regained movement and the heavy dressing came off, my mobility returned extremely quickly: I’ve been walking unaided (albeit relatively slowly and with mild pain) for well over a week now. The only really major challenges are sitting upright with bent knees (like at a desk, like I’m doing right now), which becomes painful after about 15 minutes and needs me to stand up and stretch the knee out, and laying in a sleeping position for the same reason: the long muscles in the leg start cramping up painfully and once they start, the pain doesn’t stop regardless of how I move around for a good while.

• This is the first truly debilitating injury I’ve had in my life, so it’s been a fascinating experience of emotions and perspectives. The worst injury I experienced, in terms of medical severity, was a concussion I sustained when I was 7 or 8 (?) years old. I was kicked into blacktop, head first, and was blind for about 24 hours. My vision returned, but I was paralyzed down one side for a period of some months (I want to say two?), had to wear my arm in a sling so it wouldn’t spasm around, and had a crutch. My movement gradually returned over that period and I mainly remember it as something that got me out of gym class.

  The various experiences of immobility and long-lasting pain from this one have given me a lot of food for thought about what it would be like if any of these conditions lasted forever for me, as they do for many people: not being able to use my legs, not being able to walk unaided, not being able to do anything requiring standing, being in continuous, sobbing and crying pain that is difficult to treat, not being able to be awake or mentally alert for long periods of time.

  • As I think about these things, and how relatively fortunate I am for them to all have been relatively short-lived states of being as opposed to being permanent ones, there’s one thing I remain particularly grateful for: not being one of the apparently 1 in 4 people (paraphrasing here from a 2020 survey that 1 in 4 people have absolutely no close friend or family member they could call upon) that have absolutely no direct social support from another human being. If I didn’t have support at home, the hospital wouldn’t have released me for at least a week, which would have probably financially ruined us. I’m aware that there are millions if not billions of people in the world who would have had to go through this (or a chronic version of any part of it) with absolutely no one to help them get to the bathroom, dress themselves, bring them food or water, or call doctors to get more information because they were too weak or tired to do it.

    • I had been formulating this idea prior to my surgery, but reflecting on my experiences thus far have solidified it for me: absent anything else, the single most valuable resource an individual can have is the reliable real-life presence and support of at least one other person. If you have this, it’s worth more than quite a lot of other things that are nominally very valuable, like a high-paying job, wealth, home ownership, even less-controllable things like living in a safe or stable country or being of good general health. Leaving aside all philosophical concerns about whether one SHOULD prioritize human connection over wealth, pleasure, etc., if a young person were to ask me, purely pragmatically, what is the most important thing to get in life, my answer would be, “a close supportive network of other people you can trust” (which I realize is a cold ways of saying it, but it works either way).

  • The dogs of the household did not handle my return from the hospital well, and it wasn’t until a couple of days after I started looking more “normal” without bandages, braces, or walkers that they calmed down. They were quite scared of external metal apparatuses like crutches and walkers and ran from them, but were also highly stressed from all the moaning or crying or screaming. For the first two days, Dog #1 (pictured in the above leg photos) lay awkwardly up against me and wouldn’t allow the other dogs to approach, and dangerously charged them at least once. It’s amazing to me what intense psychic sponges dogs are, and how they instinctively mirror their emotional landscape.

  • I also learned I don’t do very well in this kind of situation- i.e., being a largely inactive “patient.” It was very fortunate that the physical therapist told me that there was very little I could do- short of very specific movements or deliberately overstressing my leg- that would risk harm to the implant and do anything other than hurt a lot, because it gave me permission to try to return to normal as quickly as I could, which has been a frustrating exercise in limitation (but at least I feel that I’m ‘safely’ exercising). I can’t realistically participate in any farm work right now, and plenty needs to be done. Until this past weekend, I could work at a computer for maybe 30 minutes at a time, and pain made it difficult to focus for more than a few minutes at a time on anything (which is probably why you’ve all been seeing me commenting around the stackosphere and wondering why the hell I’m not posting). When I was taking oxy during the day, I had maybe a half hour after taking it until I would either become a completely mindless zombie or just fall asleep. I haven’t been able to work on various outstanding jobs, which means I haven’t been earning money, and with Husbandmouth still unemployed, I spend that time worrying about financial ruin. I was able to run a few meetings last week, and as you can see here, I’m able to write at a desk now, so I’m at about 75% of my professional value, better than things were.

    • I was raised with what I would call a fairly harsh ideology around the need to earn money and be productively active (at a job or otherwise) as reflecting one’s value as a person- the idea of someone being chronically out of work, or if wealthy being idle and hedonistic, was anathema and looked at as something to be at least mildly disgusted with. “Doing nothing” was seen as a kind of moral failure- much more strongly by my mother and her side of the family, but certainly from everyone in my household to some extent. Though I’ve been my own grownup for a few decades now, I find it still informs many of my emotions when I find myself thinking “what value does this person serve to anyone” and thinking ugly thoughts, and it’s rough when you turn that knife on yourself.

  • I have a vigorous rehab schedule and a good physical therapist. While I’m told I shouldn’t expected to play sports for 6-9 months, I will be walking normally very soon, and not long after that able to run and do most kinds of outdoor work. I’m already well ahead of schedule in terms of my stamina and range of movement- I’m very optimistic about how it will all work out, but it took a few days before I could feel confident that it would be worth the journey.

• At least partly due to my less-than-ideal functioning, Fathermouth living with us has gotten stressful. I’m beginning to notice a few things that indicate early dementia- I more than once saw him space out and do the “Beavis hands” thing that Brandon did on CNN. He frequently chooses not to wear his hearing aid and gets frustrated and passive-aggressive with people who try to talk to him. He completely ignores any sort of boundaries around demanding people’s attention: he’ll walk right in front of a TV or computer screen, walk right up to someone reading a book or working at a keyboard, and just start talking- no “excuse me,” no “are you busy,” no prompts at all- just a stream of consciousness of something that happened or he thought about recently. Very often, he’ll begin these diatribes using completely unknown pronouns, like beginning a conversation with “That reminds me of what I said about it yesterday,” requiring you to tease out any shred of meaning (what’s “that”? What’s “it?”) that might possibly be found- and you’d better strive to find those shreds of meaning, because being indifferent or simply saying “ok” will instantly get you sarcasm (choose from “I’m sorry to talk to you” or “I’m sorry to take you away from your incredibly important business”) or passive-aggression (wandering away and saying “I’ll ask someone else if they know what I’m talking about because I see this is difficult for you”). When he’s in the same room as someone trying to focus on something, it seems to be an impossible exercise in self-control to leave them alone- if he doesn’t constantly interrupt them as in the previous examples, he fills the room with chatter talking to himself or pretending to talk to the dogs. As a currently slow-moving target trying desperately to catch up on two weeks of work, I’m very often the roadkill of this behavior pattern.

  • I remind myself that this is happening because he’s very lonely, and that we’re largely his only options for human interaction, and try not to get angry about it. But I’ll be honest, I’ve sometimes absolutely gone to sleep just as a way of hiding and being left alone.

  • He is angry at Husbandmouth for still being unemployed and finds reasons to interpret his behavior in the worst way possible, to the point that he mostly just sits and stares/glares at him when they’re both in the room. Shortly before the surgery I had suggested to Husbandmouth that he and dad sit down and talk this out so the tension will stop, but it was evidently contingent on me refereeing and I don’t have the energy to right now.

  • I’ve completed most of the work in completing his “no agent buy” for his new house; I crutched myself to a notary with the seller to get a purchase agreement done, and a title search is underway. Everything else is done. In early January, we close, he moves in, and he has his own space 500 feet from our house, and everything presumably gets easier for everyone. Both dad and the buyer are saving approximately $30K om the deal this way- I keep waiting to find out what I did wrong, but I’ve been assured enough times that everything is fine that I’m just going to be pleased about it now.

• The farm is more or less prepared for the beginning of winter, which feels very close. The steer and cow are scheduled for slaughter in January, and we already have a buyer lined up for half the meat from each (we’ll keep the other half). I finally got a straight answer from another beef farmer at the last Grange meeting as to why I might not have calved this spring/summer as hoped, so rather than slaughter the bull, we’re going to separate our heifer and cow for a week or two as they are, amazingly, still not weaned. When the cow’s milk dries up, this will appararently normalize both their estrus cycles and we should be able to breed everyone normally. I believe we have at least one if not two pregnant sows, so I expect piglets in February.

  • The greenhouse has started wintering our coffee, tea, avocado, and citrus bushes, and some young berry bushes that arrived too late to plant this year. It appears to be doing its job nicely, but I’m still relying on everyone else in the house to tend to everything in there as the walk is too far and the ground is too uneven for me.

  • The chickens are maturing to good sizes and egg production is still holding pretty steady even as the cold weather has arrived. Apparently out in the real world, eggs have gotten ruinously expensive and are actually not on the shelf in some areas; when a neighbor stopped by to check on me, she mentioned these surprising facts so we sent her home with a dozen.

  • I intend to smoke the last of the beef and pork from this year if it isn’t used up by the time the new ones are slaughtered in Jan. This will be our first time making sausage in quite a few years, not since we used to regularly go boar hunting. Yay sausage.

• As mentioned previously, Husbandmouth remains out of work. It has been the source of some tension and admittedly some arguing. He is continuing to search for a new job, though our differences in personality can cause me to feel that he doesn’t appreciate the urgency of the situation. Some of this is probably my own perception. In any case, he is trying.

• We were treated to a performance of “David” at Sight and Sound Theatres last week, and I was just barely mobile enough to make it- but I’m glad I did. If you have the opportunity to see a show at Sight and Sound and you enjoy any aspect of theatre- even if you’re not Christian or particularly religious- take the opportunity to have the experience. It’s a truly unique theatre experience and an amazing performance. While the huge team of actors and technicians and producers are, of course, doing it as a passionately evangelical activity, it really is an amazing thing to see for anyone.

• It was Brothermouth’s birthday recently (he is exactly 3 years and two weeks older than me). In the short time we’ve lived here, his dedication to mastering skills and labors that he had never done in his life has made him grow in ways I honestly wouldn’t have expected given our respective ages. He is stronger, healthier, and more energetic than I’ve ever seen him, and I had no idea how deeply his talents for craft and creation truly ran. I feel that he has found part of himself that he never knew existed here. I am very proud of him.

• Wow, that was incredibly gay.

• I’m separating out my roundup of recent events into a separate post, which will be up shortly (and this text will be changed to a link when it is, so archaeologists in the future can find it intuitively). The personal stuff ran very long this time because of the extended time away, and I know some people are much more interested in the farm stuff than others, and vice verse for the politics. So, for your convenience, this week’s Thing separates the shit into two clearly-labeled toilets.

1. My search term was actually “toilet fire,” but I love the concept of the CIA World Factbook having an entry for the United States that is remotely honest or accurate.