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Tuesday, March 20, 2001

Surviving (Reboot)



I think I'm finally slowly starting to get better.

I drove my truck today, and my calf didn't cramp up.

I flossed my teeth, and afterwards my hands only felt like they'd been run over, not crushed repeatedly under a large rock.

My arms ache. This is much better than having ice picks stuck in my shoulders.

I can make a fist, and it only hurts instead of sounding like I'm chewing ice.

I haven't fallen asleep on the couch in at least a couple of days.


(All this damage from an innocent little vaccine a month ago today!)


On the bright side, the month off my feet seems to have nearly cured my damaged foot. If I can just rescue the leg its attached to, perhaps I will some day glide again instead of limping. I'm not entirely sure what's wrong with the leg at this point. The knee hurts still, but that's the least of it now. Imagine if someone took a knitting needle, jabbed it into your glutious maximus, and rammed it amidst the fibers of your thigh muscle to the inside of the back of your knee. Then perform a similar violation of your calf, and then stick random sharp objects into the muscles of your foot, and you have an idea. But it does seem to be getting better, very slowly.

I think perhaps it was an unfortunate interaction between the foot-injury induced limp and the vaccine-induced global destruction, with a splash of ibuprofin. Yes -- I am suspicious of the ibuprofin itself at this point, since I looked back through my log and realized that the muscle cramps showed up out of the blue the day I started taking it, and pretty much cleared up when I made the connection and decided to trade the cramps back in for disfunctional joints again.

But the leg is still scrod. It really just doesn't want to work right at all. So I've been training it to walk again, using my left leg as an example. It's remarkably hard -- so much is subconscious! For two days I tried to walk straight and symmetric before I realized that I wasn't using my toes! My happy foot grabs the ground as I walk, transfers weight around subtly along the tips of the toes, keeps the foot taut. My sad foot is dead like a block of wood, afraid to move because moving hurts, so the leg tugs on its tendons like a puppeteer and the hips just kind of poll vault over the heel, and all the while my cerebellum surreptitiously triggers aggressive compensations that wreak havoc on the hardware that just wasn't meant to work like this.

So I'm becoming my own physical therapist. Right foot, do what the left one does! I just wonder if I can get it over the hump, working well enough for the subconscious process to pick it up and finish the job, or if I'll inevitably miss some number of little details that make all the difference... Time will tell. Perhaps I'll become an expert at the intricacies of bipedal locomotion.

I just wish someone would pull out these knitting needles.


My Megacorp project hits the streets Real Soon Now(TM). What few hours I've had between excessive sleeping, foraging for food, and failing to find any doctors available before April, I've spent working on The Project. One of the guys working on a piece of it lives in Germany. I was working with him by email, early in his day, and finally told him I had to go to bed (3am?). When I got up, had a snack, and got back to work, I fired him off a note. He was still at work, hadn't even been there eight hours yet. "Five hours enough sleep for you?" he asked. It gave me a whole new perspective on how much I work--that nineteen hour days feel typical to me. Also means I must be getting better because a week ago I would have slept 14 hours, not five. In any event, it's time for a shift. Money be damned (and it will be 'cause my stock options are in the toilet), I'll be out of there in a month or so, and on to new things. (Ida been outta there already if my body hadn't self-destructed and slipped my schedule by a month or two...)

So, what next? My daydreams are cautious until I know my recovery asymptote, but the possibilities are growing by the day...



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Simon Funk / simonfunk@gmail.com