Blog at http://drpeg2003.blogspot.com/
June 6, 2006 (11:36am)
Mail call. Thanks to my sister Janet; Lois Stavig; the Vaughans, who sent more tapes of radio shows, old and new; and the Browns, who sent a DVD of Fever Pitch, which they said at least Gary should like, baseball being part of the story ;-)
When I came in this morning Gary was having the casting done on his legs, during which he pointed out to me that the tape had been entirely removed from his fingers. He still can’t bend the one that was broken very much, and it looks fatter than it used to. We’re not sure if that’s due to swelling or to the rod and pins. After that came his bath, and then they wheeled him down to the auditorium for a Vocational Rehab meeting – which lasted about ten minutes! The voc person met Gary and told him she’d come to his room and meet with him later when it was closer to his discharge date. She will help with any issues that arise in returning him to his job (though Gary expects AU will be very cooperative about this), and will also help with the details about the special car he will need when he is able to drive. Again this may be awhile because of the flap surgery, we’re not absolutely clear on this – we know he won’t be able to do the sliding transfers to get in and out of a car, though we’re hoping he gets strong enough to do the depression transfers, where he uses his arms (triceps) to lift his entire body weight straight up and then does little “hops” on his butt to get over to where he wants to go; otherwise he and someone else, possibly me, will be using the hoyer lift to get him in and out of the car.
After lunch, just before wheeling him to another class, a nurse came in with a staple remover (I asked her if she’d bought it at Office Depot ;-)) and took out every other one of Gary’s staples on the side of him she could get to, telling us she’d do the same thing on the other side after they turned him after the class. If the skin in that area looks good tomorrow, they will remove all the remaining staples.
His hour-long class was “Wellness and Leisure Ed. 1" In the first half the lecturer asked the audience what they thought wellness was, and she touched on the different areas it encompassed – mental, physical, emotional, social, vocational, spiritual. She mentioned the basic stuff to do to enhance them – eat right, exercise, keep a positive attitude, etc. She spent a lot of time saying very little, IMHO.
In the second half she talked about leisure, again supposedly trying to involve the audience by asking them what they thought leisure was (I thought this kind of thing a little patronizing). The depressing stuff came next. She made a pie chart of work, leisure, and maintenance (eating, sleeping, dressing, etc.). She talked about how when most people go home after a spinal cord injury their pie becomes half maintenance, half leisure – no work. Maintenance takes longer than it did before for reasons like it takes a half hour to get dressed, bathing takes longer, etc. Leisure takes up more time because many people can’t go back to work, at least right at first, and some not at all. Many people will no longer be able to do their former occupations (for example, if they are laborers) or at least not handle the duties they had before. Gary is so grateful that this kind of thing does not apply to him.
She said that, typically, a month after a person gets home they will be starting to get used to the home situation and to the accessibility issues they run into when going outside the home. At six months their routine will be more established and maintenance time will decrease. A year after they get home is when they typically return to work.
She next gave us statistics:
• 30% of those with SCI become socially isolated. Reasons given: it’s easier to stay home, social stigma, they can’t interact with their peers the way they used to, transportation issues.
• 30% start watching six or more hours of television a day.
• 40 to 60% become substance abusers (they are currently doing new research on this, so the estimate isn’t very exact).
She ended the lecture by telling the crowd she wanted them to think how they were going to use all that new leisure time.
I told Gary I thought the first half was boring, and the second depressing. He said he thought the same thing; he said it was depressing seeing that pie chart of half maintenance and half leisure. But then he rallied, saying he didn’t see how anything we’ve learned since we’ve been here would mean that he wouldn’t be able to handle a class in the fall (I agreed, telling him the people here who might think otherwise weren’t familiar with the flexibility of his job), and then he went on to say that if for some reason he couldn’t be ready to be on campus for the first day of classes in the fall, that he would still have his graduate students to work with, and Topology Proceedings stuff to attend to (he is an editor of the journal and is even doing a bit with it while here), and could do his research (I reminded him that many of his colleagues have emailed him about being ready to talk math with him when he is ready). The problem with not being able to teach, he went on with a sad smile, was that he wouldn’t get paid.
So, obviously, he wants to return to his job fully ASAP. We’re still having him being able to do that for fall semester as our goal for him.
When he returned to his room, the tech turned him to his other side and the nurse removed more of the staples. When she left, I asked Gary if he wanted me to stretch his feet now, and he said that would be hard – I had forgotten he was wearing those casts.
This reminds me. We had a funny-sad thing happen while I was stretching his feet yesterday. There are two stretches per foot, each to be held for a minute. I asked him to time it. When I was on the second foot, it seemed to me I had been holding the stretch for a long time, and I looked up to find him reading a book. “Isn’t the minute up yet?” I asked. “Oops, I forgot about it,” he replied. He couldn’t feel me stretching his ankle, so it’d gone out of his mind. I wonder, had I not said anything, how long it would have been before he wondered what I was doing down at the end of his bed :-)
Shortly after his class, in a call prearranged yesterday, Piotr Minc called so Gary could walk him through getting files from Gary’s computer and emailing them. Gary wants to referee a paper that he thought was on there (turns out it was not where he thought it was, but he can get the paper another way).
After that, he took a nap, I wrote this, and then I slipped off for a massage. The woman, the first therapist I had seen here, suggested I needed psoas work. I agreed to it, though not without an ironic smile. Agreeing to psoas work is like agreeing to have dental work without anesthesia. No, I exaggerate. I have had dental work without anesthesia because I have reactions to the anesthesia. The entire time I have all I can do to not bite the dentist’s hand off. It’s debatable whether it is better to suffer that short-term intense pain, the worst being over in about an hour, or to suffer feeling overall sick and aching from the anesthetic for about a week afterward. Psoas work is easier – I only feel like hitting the therapist for about ten minutes (maybe it’s less than that – time expands when you’re in pain) while she inflicts torture on the muscles around the pelvis, and then the pain is over entirely.
After the massage I started my dinner, and while it was cooking I meditated. Then I returned to Gary’s room. He was still thinking about that leisure lecture, I surmise, since he talked about how the people in Birmingham had certainly been over-optimistic about what he would be capable of, saying that they thought he could go on the cruise with his family in July, whereas he now knows that even without the flap surgery there was no way he could have done that and gotten ready to teach in the fall. I asked him if he thought it’d been a bad thing for them to be that optimistic with him. He said no, that even though he had been skeptical, it’d made him optimistic. But it had made him surprised, and not in a good way, when his doctor here had told him he wouldn’t be ready for school for about six months. I made some noises about that likely not being the case either, and we then had somewhat a repeat of previous discussions. Gary said his doc here should know. I said the doc knows how it was more than fifteen years ago to go back to trying to be a student and that he didn’t understand what a professor’s job is like. Gary said, “Yeah.” I told him he should be optimistic about going back to teaching in the fall until proven otherwise. He said “Yeah,” again, with conviction.
We finished the Dylan DVD. Gary said he found it very surprising that Dylan’s songs seem to say so much (at least, the early ones), yet in interviews he has nothing to say of note. I said maybe it was really true what he seems to claim, if I’m understanding what he said on the DVD correctly, that he writes his songs without anything in mind as to what they mean, though I can’t imagine writing anything without having some meaning for it in mind. Gary said maybe that was true, that maybe the guy was just good at stringing words together to create a mood, the lyrics in themselves signifying nothing. “Sound and fury, signifying nothing,” I joked.
It was about time to go, and I asked him if he wanted anything at the store when I went tomorrow for zukes, thinking protein, fruit, vegetables. “Hagen Daz chocolate chip ice cream,” came the request. I gave him a baleful eye, then left.
I will get it for him, of course.
Tonight’s final non sequitur. I am so very grateful Gary doesn’t have to experience chronic pain. One of the first things I read about spinal cord injuries was that those with them could suffer chronic pain. I had hoped Gary would be spared that, having familiarity with it from my early CFS days (at that time I thought “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” could just as well be named “Chronic Pain Syndrome,” since pain and fatigue went hand in hand for me and it was debatable which was the more debilitating, not to mention that both names summarized the malady about as well as calling tuberculosis “Chronic Coughing Syndrome” – fortunately, as a result of the shots I give myself, obtained through the Environmental Health Center in Dallas, for the past five years I have not been in that kind of pain, the kind of pain that made me quite seriously wonder how much longer I could live with it; and now this parenthetical thought has gone on for so long you’ve forgotten what I was saying and will have to go back and look at what I wrote before it) and so far he seems to have been. I remember in the lecture on the spinal cord I attended without Gary the speaker went over that possibility in some detail, describing what it might feel like and the possible ways to deal with it (pain medicine to acupuncture). Interestingly, in the lecture Gary heard that covered this topic, the lecturer didn’t dwell on it to as great an extent.
So, anyway, I am glad Gary has never been in pain with this and I hope it stays that way.
All for now.
June 6, 2006 (11:36am)
Mail call. Thanks to my sister Janet; Lois Stavig; the Vaughans, who sent more tapes of radio shows, old and new; and the Browns, who sent a DVD of Fever Pitch, which they said at least Gary should like, baseball being part of the story ;-)
When I came in this morning Gary was having the casting done on his legs, during which he pointed out to me that the tape had been entirely removed from his fingers. He still can’t bend the one that was broken very much, and it looks fatter than it used to. We’re not sure if that’s due to swelling or to the rod and pins. After that came his bath, and then they wheeled him down to the auditorium for a Vocational Rehab meeting – which lasted about ten minutes! The voc person met Gary and told him she’d come to his room and meet with him later when it was closer to his discharge date. She will help with any issues that arise in returning him to his job (though Gary expects AU will be very cooperative about this), and will also help with the details about the special car he will need when he is able to drive. Again this may be awhile because of the flap surgery, we’re not absolutely clear on this – we know he won’t be able to do the sliding transfers to get in and out of a car, though we’re hoping he gets strong enough to do the depression transfers, where he uses his arms (triceps) to lift his entire body weight straight up and then does little “hops” on his butt to get over to where he wants to go; otherwise he and someone else, possibly me, will be using the hoyer lift to get him in and out of the car.
After lunch, just before wheeling him to another class, a nurse came in with a staple remover (I asked her if she’d bought it at Office Depot ;-)) and took out every other one of Gary’s staples on the side of him she could get to, telling us she’d do the same thing on the other side after they turned him after the class. If the skin in that area looks good tomorrow, they will remove all the remaining staples.
His hour-long class was “Wellness and Leisure Ed. 1" In the first half the lecturer asked the audience what they thought wellness was, and she touched on the different areas it encompassed – mental, physical, emotional, social, vocational, spiritual. She mentioned the basic stuff to do to enhance them – eat right, exercise, keep a positive attitude, etc. She spent a lot of time saying very little, IMHO.
In the second half she talked about leisure, again supposedly trying to involve the audience by asking them what they thought leisure was (I thought this kind of thing a little patronizing). The depressing stuff came next. She made a pie chart of work, leisure, and maintenance (eating, sleeping, dressing, etc.). She talked about how when most people go home after a spinal cord injury their pie becomes half maintenance, half leisure – no work. Maintenance takes longer than it did before for reasons like it takes a half hour to get dressed, bathing takes longer, etc. Leisure takes up more time because many people can’t go back to work, at least right at first, and some not at all. Many people will no longer be able to do their former occupations (for example, if they are laborers) or at least not handle the duties they had before. Gary is so grateful that this kind of thing does not apply to him.
She said that, typically, a month after a person gets home they will be starting to get used to the home situation and to the accessibility issues they run into when going outside the home. At six months their routine will be more established and maintenance time will decrease. A year after they get home is when they typically return to work.
She next gave us statistics:
• 30% of those with SCI become socially isolated. Reasons given: it’s easier to stay home, social stigma, they can’t interact with their peers the way they used to, transportation issues.
• 30% start watching six or more hours of television a day.
• 40 to 60% become substance abusers (they are currently doing new research on this, so the estimate isn’t very exact).
She ended the lecture by telling the crowd she wanted them to think how they were going to use all that new leisure time.
I told Gary I thought the first half was boring, and the second depressing. He said he thought the same thing; he said it was depressing seeing that pie chart of half maintenance and half leisure. But then he rallied, saying he didn’t see how anything we’ve learned since we’ve been here would mean that he wouldn’t be able to handle a class in the fall (I agreed, telling him the people here who might think otherwise weren’t familiar with the flexibility of his job), and then he went on to say that if for some reason he couldn’t be ready to be on campus for the first day of classes in the fall, that he would still have his graduate students to work with, and Topology Proceedings stuff to attend to (he is an editor of the journal and is even doing a bit with it while here), and could do his research (I reminded him that many of his colleagues have emailed him about being ready to talk math with him when he is ready). The problem with not being able to teach, he went on with a sad smile, was that he wouldn’t get paid.
So, obviously, he wants to return to his job fully ASAP. We’re still having him being able to do that for fall semester as our goal for him.
When he returned to his room, the tech turned him to his other side and the nurse removed more of the staples. When she left, I asked Gary if he wanted me to stretch his feet now, and he said that would be hard – I had forgotten he was wearing those casts.
This reminds me. We had a funny-sad thing happen while I was stretching his feet yesterday. There are two stretches per foot, each to be held for a minute. I asked him to time it. When I was on the second foot, it seemed to me I had been holding the stretch for a long time, and I looked up to find him reading a book. “Isn’t the minute up yet?” I asked. “Oops, I forgot about it,” he replied. He couldn’t feel me stretching his ankle, so it’d gone out of his mind. I wonder, had I not said anything, how long it would have been before he wondered what I was doing down at the end of his bed :-)
Shortly after his class, in a call prearranged yesterday, Piotr Minc called so Gary could walk him through getting files from Gary’s computer and emailing them. Gary wants to referee a paper that he thought was on there (turns out it was not where he thought it was, but he can get the paper another way).
After that, he took a nap, I wrote this, and then I slipped off for a massage. The woman, the first therapist I had seen here, suggested I needed psoas work. I agreed to it, though not without an ironic smile. Agreeing to psoas work is like agreeing to have dental work without anesthesia. No, I exaggerate. I have had dental work without anesthesia because I have reactions to the anesthesia. The entire time I have all I can do to not bite the dentist’s hand off. It’s debatable whether it is better to suffer that short-term intense pain, the worst being over in about an hour, or to suffer feeling overall sick and aching from the anesthetic for about a week afterward. Psoas work is easier – I only feel like hitting the therapist for about ten minutes (maybe it’s less than that – time expands when you’re in pain) while she inflicts torture on the muscles around the pelvis, and then the pain is over entirely.
After the massage I started my dinner, and while it was cooking I meditated. Then I returned to Gary’s room. He was still thinking about that leisure lecture, I surmise, since he talked about how the people in Birmingham had certainly been over-optimistic about what he would be capable of, saying that they thought he could go on the cruise with his family in July, whereas he now knows that even without the flap surgery there was no way he could have done that and gotten ready to teach in the fall. I asked him if he thought it’d been a bad thing for them to be that optimistic with him. He said no, that even though he had been skeptical, it’d made him optimistic. But it had made him surprised, and not in a good way, when his doctor here had told him he wouldn’t be ready for school for about six months. I made some noises about that likely not being the case either, and we then had somewhat a repeat of previous discussions. Gary said his doc here should know. I said the doc knows how it was more than fifteen years ago to go back to trying to be a student and that he didn’t understand what a professor’s job is like. Gary said, “Yeah.” I told him he should be optimistic about going back to teaching in the fall until proven otherwise. He said “Yeah,” again, with conviction.
We finished the Dylan DVD. Gary said he found it very surprising that Dylan’s songs seem to say so much (at least, the early ones), yet in interviews he has nothing to say of note. I said maybe it was really true what he seems to claim, if I’m understanding what he said on the DVD correctly, that he writes his songs without anything in mind as to what they mean, though I can’t imagine writing anything without having some meaning for it in mind. Gary said maybe that was true, that maybe the guy was just good at stringing words together to create a mood, the lyrics in themselves signifying nothing. “Sound and fury, signifying nothing,” I joked.
It was about time to go, and I asked him if he wanted anything at the store when I went tomorrow for zukes, thinking protein, fruit, vegetables. “Hagen Daz chocolate chip ice cream,” came the request. I gave him a baleful eye, then left.
I will get it for him, of course.
Tonight’s final non sequitur. I am so very grateful Gary doesn’t have to experience chronic pain. One of the first things I read about spinal cord injuries was that those with them could suffer chronic pain. I had hoped Gary would be spared that, having familiarity with it from my early CFS days (at that time I thought “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” could just as well be named “Chronic Pain Syndrome,” since pain and fatigue went hand in hand for me and it was debatable which was the more debilitating, not to mention that both names summarized the malady about as well as calling tuberculosis “Chronic Coughing Syndrome” – fortunately, as a result of the shots I give myself, obtained through the Environmental Health Center in Dallas, for the past five years I have not been in that kind of pain, the kind of pain that made me quite seriously wonder how much longer I could live with it; and now this parenthetical thought has gone on for so long you’ve forgotten what I was saying and will have to go back and look at what I wrote before it) and so far he seems to have been. I remember in the lecture on the spinal cord I attended without Gary the speaker went over that possibility in some detail, describing what it might feel like and the possible ways to deal with it (pain medicine to acupuncture). Interestingly, in the lecture Gary heard that covered this topic, the lecturer didn’t dwell on it to as great an extent.
So, anyway, I am glad Gary has never been in pain with this and I hope it stays that way.
All for now.
posted by Peg Daniels at 7:49 AM
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