Living Life

The last month has been has been really busy.  Though the improvements are still happening, life is happening as well and that has been taking up a lot more time, time that I used to use for my blog posts.

I'm still improving my ranges and I'm still expecting to exceed the surgeons six month estimate of another 10 degrees.  I'm just over halfway to that goal on the left side and the right is just under.  

I'm still keeping up with my physio, hydro and pilates and fitting in real life around these activities.  My hours at work have increased and I'm starting my study back up again at the end of the month.  I'm not sure where this is all going to lead me but wherever that is, I'm well on my way.

I probably won't be checking in here too often as time goes on but I receive comments by email so if you have any questions about any of my posts or my experiences, please comment!

Hydro Wednesday

How can you not be happy on a beautiful day like today?  I'm not sure what happened this morning but I woke up and I just felt great.  Maybe even a little hyperactive.  All a little strange really.  I reinforced the hyper with a little caffeine and I think that the proper adjective for me this afternoon is 'bouncy'.  Not that I'm jumping around the office this afternoon (still a little while before the femurs will like that), but I was jumping around the pool this morning.  I had a good session today and spent an extra half hour in the pool literally jumping around.  I'm wondering if the muscles will ache a little tomorrow.  It will be a good ache, so I'll accept it gratefully! (Well there may be minor whinging if it's really bad but in a positive and amazed way!)

It's starting to feel like the more I do, the more I can do.  I've never felt like that before.  It was always the more I do, the more I have to figure out what I can not do to balance it out.  I'm sure that at some point there will be a wall that I will fly into head first and I find what my new limits are.  They are moving so quickly at the moment, I'm not really keeping up with them which is why it seems like I can keep going forever at the moment.

I'm at work at the moment, having a little afternoon break while my printer goes to work.  It's been a good day here too.  I'm slowly starting to take on more work and getting on top of the handover from the previous person looking after a lot of it.  It has been a big week so far and I'm just half way through.  I'm likely to have a few more big days this week and I'm actually ready for them.

The week in review

For the first couple of days this week my lower back has been a little bit sore.  I had some trigger pointing on Monday which released it but it was pretty quick to tighten up again.  I've kept moving and applying heat when I'm seated and it has helped.  I think it might be a combination of not setting my core properly for the whole pilates session or compensation and adjustments due to changing my cane to my left hand.

I'm not sure if I covered the change to the left hand for the cane.  It has been just over a week that we decided to give that a go.  My walking isn't good enough for no support at all when I'm out of the house and walking distances but I don't need very much assistance anymore.  As my left leg has become the stronger side with more range we have swapped over.  I walk a little straighter holding it in my left hand but it feels a little odd.  The positive is that it feels a little odd in both hands now that I'm not really using it a great deal around the house.  A couple of times I've opened the front door to go out and realised as I went to lock up that I didn't have the cane with me.  It is progress.

So the focus of my daily exercises, hydro and pilates is to bring the right side up to scratch, focus on setting the core and getting the right glute firing as well as the left.  Alignment is taking a lot of concentration as I learn where everything should go.  I've spoken about this quite a bit in the last few months and it is still something I am conscious of all of the time.  Well, maybe not when I wake in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom or am in a hurry somewhere but most of the time.

I do wonder if maybe I didn't do enough glute squeezes when I was in hospital.  As I've progressed and hospital was so long ago, I do question whether I did enough.  If I look back through the old posts, I don't think I had the energy to do much more but you always wonder about these types of things.  I have to add a few more in to the repertoire.  I learnt a new way at Pilates on Friday.  Laying on my stomach with my knees apart at neutral and bent so my heels are in the air.  The heels are together like frog feet.  Then its squeeze, hold, release patterns.  Both sides and then one at a time.  Funny things is, that in that position, I can actually really feel the difference between the left and the right.  I can't remember what the name of them is so I can find a better description of what it is.  I'll ask again next Friday and try find a picture as I really don't think that I've given you a proper description.

Though it's been busy, I am pretty happy with how life is turning out.  Even though I'm not there yet and there are a lot of unknowns, I do feel that I am on the right path in my life for the first time in a very long time.  There is a couple of people who seem to think that I should be miserable and trying to find issue with things.  I think this comes from the fact that things are very different from how they used to be.  I have been focused on what I need to do to get the best results possible out of the surgery and this has meant that I haven't always been available to others.  I was usually the one that could always be relied upon to do what everyone else wanted me to do.  Now that I am focused on me instead of them, there must be something wrong.  I am busy and I have a lot to deal with but I am fine to do that on my own.  When I'm up to it, I need to work in the spaces between rehab activities.  I need to make sure that I'm preparing healthy meals and eating well.  I need to get enough sleep.  I need to be engaging my brain and getting back into things.  There isn't too much time left over after that.  After a period of time things will normalise a bit more and I won't need as much rest on weekends to catchup and rejuvenate and I'll value that extra time a bit more than I used to.  I don't think I've become particularly selfish.  Just enough to be healthy.

Thursday wasn't very fun.  My husband's iMac blew up.  (Well my iMac but there is some question of ownership since I have claimed the MacBook Air!  I suppose it is his now it has been in his office since I got the 27" iMac at the start of last year and possession is nine-tenths of the law, right?  By that logic, I'm on the Air now typing my blog post, so it's really mine right?)  That was a truly tragic day.  There are still other Macs around but this one just can't be replaced.  It's one of the 24" aluminium case ones that they don't make anymore.  My husband's office seemed so sad without it.  It was taken to the doctors and we didn't have a huge amount of hope as to its recovery as the magic smoke had been released after a bit of a bang and that bad computer smell that happens when bad things happen.  Usually there is no coming back from that.  Somehow, this Mac was special and is alive again.  I don't know how but I am thankful!

With the resurrection of the iMac, a switched off telephone and an afternoon nap, today was a good day.  I ruffled a few feathers to have a time out day today to spend with my husband but it is worth it.  With so much going on, I need to remember not to take time for granted and continue to make my priorities a little closer to home.  There has been no 'big issue' to prompt this revelation.  It started with the closure of the last business that I worked for and has progressively become more of a mission.   This was part of the catalyst to do the surgery this year.  It might seem a little bit of a drastic response to the end of a job and it is a little bit more than that.  It is a new start and my body wasn't really up to a new start without the surgery.

I finally received my leave entitlements from the liquidator on Thursday and banked the cheque.  It was a little reminder to stick to my mission.   I did end up doing a rather long day that same day as the young girl at work resigned without notice leaving a rather large mess of uncompleted work.  I was happy to help out and the balance for it today was not doing any work.  I need to be careful not to sacrifice my recovery for work or health.  There are only so many hours in the day and some things will need to be sacrificed, just not anything that will cause me not to reach the full potential of the new joints.

I'm not sure what the plans are for the weekend.  There is likely to be a big sleep in and possibly a coffee run and a hunt for JaMocha Almond Fudge (my latest Baskin Robbins favourite).

Changes

Life is changing pretty quickly at the moment.  I'm still doing a lot of rehab type activities, like physio, hydro and an at home program but the other parts of life are visibly changing.  I have learnt a lot about the people who have gone through this process with me and unfortunately things I didn't want to learn about the people who didn't.  I'm starting out knowing exactly where I stand with people which is a strong platform to start again from.

I am back at work doing stop gap type work and I am adding things in that interest me.  That's led to a lot of reading and being back online just browsing, something that I've not really had the time to just enjoy for a very long time.  I think that's really some of the reason to have gone through this really.  To change that life that really wasn't working out for me work-wise, that was filled with pain and limited by joints that didn't work the way that they were supposed to.  The start to all of the changes was something beyond my control but it really was something that needed to happen.  It's scary not knowing what happens next.

I've not taken on so much that I've cut back on my rehab activities but more than enough to fill my days so I have been neglecting to write as much here.  The things that I do know is that there will be more opportunities that I will be able to take.  Little things like being able to work in the city without paying ridiculous amounts for parking since I'll actually be able to catch a bus.

I was baking on Sunday night and my sister came past to be an 'official taste tester' before I took the cupcakes in to share with the people at physio.  She asked me a hip related question at some point during the conversation and I realised that I hadn't thought about them while I was baking.  It came as a bit of a surprise that the question kind of seemed out of context even though it did relate to me and what I'm doing at the moment.  I suppose that will happen more frequently as time goes on.  It will be more difficult to forget when I start doing things that I haven't done for years.  As I meet these milestones I'll be excited by the accomplishments.  Some of the shine might wear off as I progress further but I think that there will always be some things that will always bring wonder and excitement with them.

I just have to make sure that I don't screw it up and forget the lessons that I've learnt.

Your Questions Answered!

If you've ever had a question that you wanted to ask, now is the time to ask it.  If I can get enough questions sent to me either as replies to my posts or by email, twitter (lmcia) or any other social media, I might make this a regular event.  There aren't any stupid questions.  I'll try to answer everything I get sent.

How high is the chair you have to sit on at work and how long are you sitting at any one time?
They are height adjustable chairs, so I make sure that I have them adjusted so that my feet sit flat on the floor.  I'm most comfortable when my hip angle is just a little bit less than ninety degrees.  I think this is habit after many years sitting this way so my body feels most comfortable in that position.

I should be getting up and walking around each hour and that would probably be about right when I am in the office as I get a little uncomfortable sitting in one position.  This could be the chairs in the office or  me, I'm not sure.

When I'm at home, I sit with my feet up in a recliner chair with my laptop so I sometimes sit for longer than an hour working away.  I usually have to get up for something every hour or so anyway.  Sometimes it's to get more papers to get some work done, other times it's for a drink or something to snack on.  Sometimes it's just to move around.

Do you have trouble walking after you have been sitting for a long time?
I do limp a little bit more when I first stand up.  It usually takes me a few steps to start to loosen up a bit. It's the same in the mornings.  The elliptical helps get me moving in the mornings.  It's a little bit of change to pre-op.  Too much movement used to be what slowed me down.  It's a positive change.  One I'm not quite sure I've come to terms with yet.

As a woman how did you cope with not getting your hair done for the 6 or 7 weeks :D no serious, I'm a fella and my hair looks like a mad scientist, I can't wait to get a hair cut!
Just before I went into hospital, I had a hair cut, colour, got my eyebrows waxed and tinted and I did ok for a little while.  I had to get my tweezers brought into the hospital as the eyebrows started to bug me before anything else did.  The next thing that bothered me was my legs.  I really should have waxed those too as shaving was out due to hip restrictions.  It was totally gross.  I wore long pants a lot.  The compression socks also helped hide my legs!

When I did get home, I had my hair cut at home.  Even before the op, my hairdresser came to my friend's house and we'd all go there to get our hair cut and coloured.  When I came home, the venue changed to mine, so I didn't have to go anywhere.

When you go to the grocery shopping I assume you need your crutch to get into the shop, how do you deal with the crutch/trolley situation?
In the beginning, I took the walker with me so that I could sit down if I needed it.  I did need to sit down a few times when I first went.  When I was going with the walker, I needed someone with me as I wasn't driving yet.  Even if I had been, I wouldn't have been able to get the walker in and out of the car on my own.  I'm really not sure how the older ladies and men overcome that issue.  It's quite an awkward size and shape to lift in. It might just be that it doesn't fit into our car really well that I have so much of an issue with it.

Now I'm walking a bit better I take my crutch and put it in the trolley.  I noticed another lady doing the same thing when I was there last.  She was a little older than me but it seems to be the common solution to this problem.  Putting pressure on the trolley instead of the cane helps to stop me limping.  Shopping is becoming a little easier as time progresses.


Thanks to Tony for the questions for today!  I look forward to getting more sent through to me!

Guarding my thoughts

Today I didn't make it into the office.

I made it as far as Physio and to one of the venues to pick up invoices and then I went home to start work on them.  I wasn't up to going in today.  I'm not sure if it was the thought of the chair and table that I am using until the person using my desk full time moves into their new office or whether it was inevitable questions explaining how the work I was doing actually fits into the grand scheme of the businesses' future plans that kept me away.  Perhaps it was a combination of both.  

I started off the day with a headache and it didn't really ease until later this afternoon.  My range measurements didn't improve this week either, so not only was there pain there was also general grumpiness and a little despair at the plateau that I've reached.

I've been thinking a lot about that plateau today and have started wondering whether I ever had greater hip flexion than that.  I'm currently at a passive range of eighty degrees but I'm not sure when it was ever better than that.  Maybe it hasn't been since I was a child.  In that case, it's going to take a hell of a lot more than three months worth of stretching to bring it back.  I guess because the abduction range came back immediately, I expected the rest to follow suit pretty quickly.  Under the guise of pain, there were a few tears at Physio today.  You can kind of get away with it when you have your head in the hole and it you are involuntarily jumping each time the pain is sharp.  It probably helps that I'm a girl too.  A little more socially acceptable.   Not that anyone would say anything negative, I'm sure that they would be a great support, it's more that I don't really want to share some of these thoughts.  Not until they've been processed and I can decide how I want to deal with them.  The crazy thing is that is probably the place where how I'm feeling would be understood the best.  

I think the abundance of people who ask but don't want to really know have made me a little more guarded about discussing it especially when I am having a bit of a tough day.  I read a blog a while ago about a girl that had a total hip and wrote a blog.  She stopped blogging when someone made a comment about how that was all she ever spoke about.  It feels like that is where people are at now with me but they just haven't said it yet.  The thing is that this thing is still the central point in my life at the moment.  My whole world revolves around my rehabilitation and the distance there is still to go.  I don't have the energy for too much more than that.  It might seem like I'm projecting that all is good but this doesn't mean that I'm ready to take on anything more than I am right now.  As it stands, I think that I might have too much and I'm not making enough time for all my exercises, that somehow I should be doing more of them.  I worry that this could be part of the reason that I've hit the plateau.  These are just more things that people don't want to know.

I don't know why I thought that this would be any different than talking about the arthritis.  I didn't talk about that too often because those who haven't dealt with it before don't understand living with a chronic condition.  This is an extension of that.  Just because I want to talk about this massive change in my life, doesn't mean that others aren't sick of hearing about it.  I'm thankful for those that have been through this process and those spoonies that can understand.  Even when I have finished rehab and life is better than it has ever been, I'll probably still want to talk about them.  I guess I'm going to have to find some new people to talk to.  Ones that are interested in resurfacing, replacements and MOM joints.  I guess there will always be a place for me at Surface Hippy.  I'll also be able to blog.  People can choose to read or not.  If they don't, well they don't need to hear my hip talk and the important changes that are going on in my life. 

In an attempt to feel like I have achieved something today, I've increased the time on the elliptical today to nine and a half minutes and 500 metres.  I'm not sure how that will treat me tomorrow but I really needed to increase and improve something today.  I feel ok so far so hopefully it will be ok.  If I'm doing well tomorrow, I might try to add another minute and a half.  

Aside from exercise and Physio, I had a little bit of work to do today, though nothing was time critical.  It was more getting a bit of a start on the work that needs to be done this week.  Tomorrow is the time critical day which I already have a good start on.  As for the rest of the week, I guess I will work out as it progresses.  

End of Financial Year Craziness

And so it starts.  It is my busy time of year and the craziness has begun.  The next two weeks will really be a test of how rehabilitated I really am.  The extra days of work that I picked up about two weeks ago were to start the setup of a new digital setup for cut over at the start of the new financial year. The work that I started a month or so ago has all of the end of year things to do like payment summaries and the like.  Between the two of them, I'm busier than I have been in a very long time.  I'm trying to keep work on just the three days a week so I have four days to make sure that everything else gets done.  I haven't done so well yet as little things are creeping into other days as I'm capping out at about five - six hours of work in a day and some days I really need a little bit more than that.  Mostly this is because of the amount of data entry that I need to get done at the moment to set up this new system.  I don't think that my brain was working properly when I estimated how long the task would actually take.  My brain is getting back into gear as I get back into things.  It's almost there (the setup and my brain!) and I will be going back in tomorrow to keep working on it.  Tomorrow is expected to be a big day so today was a work day reprieve so that I could get a few other things done.

Today's big activity was grocery shopping, which I managed on my own.  I also got all of the groceries into the house by myself, put them away and then organised dinner.  It wasn't a full shop as it is an in between week, so I've started off a little easier on myself.  The last time I went grocery shopping, I went with my husband and he brought everything in so even though it has been less, I still did it by myself.

I'm still at six minutes on the elliptical today.  I was supposed to go up to seven but by the time I had the groceries away and had cooked dinner, I hit the wall and the second session only went to two and a half.  It doesn't sound like much but it is for me at the moment.  My cardio fitness is pretty disgraceful at the moment and will take a little while to recoup.  I haven't been able to do any real cardio activity for quite some time so I'm not overly surprised at the level that I'm starting from.  On the plus side, even though the muscles are fatiguing quite quickly, they are holding up to a lot faster movement than I expected at this early stage.  I'm not quite sure how the speed equates to walking due to the differences in the stride length but for me I think that averaging between 3 - 5 km/hr is definitely a great start.  If I can maintain this speed and improve my stamina, I think I would increase the resistance and incline as part of the program before trying to speed it up anymore.

I'm not quite sure what my walking speed is like at the moment and can't really think of a great way to measure it.  I had thought about using a pedometer when I go out to get a rough idea but it didn't really work out.   I tried using it around the house to count steps but it looks like I still have too much sway as it is counting too many steps.  I had wanted to record the number of steps each day to see the increase in my activity but it looks like it will have to wait for a little while longer.

Overdoing It

Last night I needed to use two crutches.  I felt like my right glute was a knot of muscles and it hurt more than I've felt pain in a very long time.  It really hurt when I put more than about 40% weight on it and when there was no weight on it, it just was a regular type of pain.  That's the strong side that I don't normally use a crutch to assist, so I ended up back with two for a while yesterday.

How did I get to this point?
Well, probably a little bit of stupid mixed in with a little bit of stubborn.  After so many years of 'managing', I really thought that I understood my body enough to have a handle on finding where the limits fall on a day to day basis.  I thought that I had learnt the lesson to listen to my body a long time ago.  I was pretty good at working out how many spoons I had each day and figuring out early if I've dropped any throughout the day (Check out the The Spoon Theory if you don't know what I'm talking about!).   With change happening every day, it is difficult for me to work it out with any accuracy at all and because I want to keep pushing forward, we have the ingredients for a 'stop work'.

Today has been a very slow day.  Muscles ache and I'm limping pretty badly.  I have done my stretches today and some of my exercises but now where near the level of activity that I have been doing over the last few weeks.  Slowing down is not really that great for my mood.  I'm going to have days like this where it feels like I'm going backwards when I am still moving forwards and just need a break.  The last few days have been the busiest that I have had since the op and I did ok.

The burst of activity started on Wednesday when I went back to the office for most of the day.  I ended up being in there for about five hours which normally wouldn't seem like a lot.  It's not that I didn't notice before how much activity this new office requires because I did. How far things actually are, how many steps I need to walk up and down, the distance to the bathroom, driving home in traffic and where the car was parked were all part of the considerations to go back.  I was ready and it was a full day.  I didn't really think about how sitting for that long would affect me and I was really tired by the time I was finished for the day.  By the time I got home I was totally exhausted but not sore.

I slept well and started early the next morning.  Life is getting back to normal and I had to do normal things like taking my car in for service.  I could have done with another few hours sleep to recover from the previous day and my muscles were still tired and a little tight from the previous day.  I felt pretty good though and we headed out after dropping the car off.  We ended up walking around a shopping centre and looking at elliptical machines.  The first place that we looked at was a no go.  The girl that was a manager couldn't seem to comprehend that I was looking at the elliptical for rehabilitation purposes not for burning calories.  I'm not quite sure whether there was a subtle underlying dig there or not as she kept going back to increasing the heart rate and a proper work out.  It seemed like she might have been in love with her own voice to, though that impression really could have come from my irritation at being told that I needed to burn some calories more than I need to build up my muscles and get my hips moving.  I'm still on crutches and I made it quite clear what my rehab requirements were and it didn't sink in.  It is possible that she was just a bimbo and meant nothing by it.

We went to another fitness store and tried out quite a few of them out.  The guy there was able to listen to our requirements and help out without being insulting.  He was actually pretty cool and helpful.  I probably spent 4 or 5 minutes on different machines which helped loosen everything up.  I wasn't using any resistance at all and that was enough to start out.  We made the decision to get one and it gets delivered on Monday. The rest of the day included finishing off some more of the work that I'd started the previous day, baking and some more chores around the house.  I was on my feel for most of the day and was really ready for sleep by the end of the day.

Friday started with a hydro session.  It went for about an hour and a half which is the longest that we have had so far.  I felt pretty good when I got out of the pool but by the time that I got home, I was pretty well wrecked.   Hydro can kind of sneak up on you like that.  It doesn't feel like you've done that much until later.  Sometimes it doesn't even hit until the next day.  I thought that I felt somewhat rejuvenated later in the afternoon so I figured that I would start on the to do list again and headed back to the shopping centre to go to medicare and MBF to sort out refunds for the surgery.  This involved a fair amount of walking and where at some point I hit the limit and ran out of spoons.

I'm not sure if it was a cumulative effect of the activity of a few days in a row or just that one day with the extended hydro session.  It could also have been one of those unexplained losses of energy linked in with something completely unrelated to the amount of physical activity that I have been doing.  My body may have just decided that it wants a break, just because.

Regardless of what the reason is for my enforced break, it's where I'm at today.  Using two crutches and going as slow as I was a few weeks ago.  I'm better than I was when I went to sleep last night but the muscles still aren't happy.  My husband was some what amused by my request to massage my ass to try and get the knot out.  Amused but he still assisted.  I would have just about asked almost anyone to massage my ass last night.  There is no dignity when it comes to pain.

Back to work planning

Today I went into my old office to plan going back.  This is a little bit more complicated than just going back to work since I don't really have a full time job to go back to.  This was one of the reasons that we decided to have the operation now.  There may be some opportunities to increase my work load but it really will be a case of wait and see.  To start off with I am increasing my one day to three days a week and starting a new project.  In a lot of ways it's good because I can go back sooner than I would had I been trying to go back to a full time position.  I'm not sure I have the energy yet for a full time job as well as the rehabilitation exercises that I still need to do.  The positive side of this arrangement is that I have all week to get everything done.  About 25% of it needs to be done by Wednesday and ideally I would have it all finished by then but I do have some room to juggle things around a bit.  The juggling room will let me make sure that I get all of my exercises done.  I know that I have more activity on the days that I go out but this doesn't cover all of the muscles that really need to be worked each day.  I've heard stories of people that don't continue with the rehab and are limited because of it.

I'm at 10 weeks post op tomorrow.  Statistically 80% of the improvements happen within the first 12 weeks, so I really need to make sure that I follow the program and stretch it out.  I guess it is all averages out though and there are a lot of people's stories that I have read who are up an walking a few miles within a month.  Surely that has to sway things the other way a bit and I'm just on the other side right?  The ones that still see steady improvement over a longer period of time in the beginning.

I'm not sure if it is my imagination or whether there are some real changes in the last few days.  I'll ask Reese when I see him at hydro in the morning.  Today I felt good so I know that I can push a little bit more in the session tomorrow.  The knot in my shoulder has almost worked it's way out and my burn doesn't hurt anymore so it's been a good day.