October 13, 2006

A few emails are prompting most of tonight’s entry.

Jane Brown passed on an interesting article about a fledgling study on functional electrical stimulation (FES) training in those with SCIs. Two days a week the participants train on the bikes with the electrodes and functional electrical stimulation and then one day a week they have them try to achieve some voluntary muscle contractions without any artificial assistance or stimulation. See http://www.utexas.edu/features/2006/spinal/index.html

Someone thought Gary’s wheelie practice seemed rather risky – I guess I should have made it clear that when he is doing the wheelies, a therapist is behind him holding onto the gait belt that is wrapped around the axle of his wheelchair, and she would pull him upright with it should he overbalance. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t let him be doing wheelies without this supervision, and he says he learned his lesson at Shepherd not to do them on his own at this point ;-)

Someone else said it is hard to tell how things are going over here now that I’ve tapered off on the blog. Not sure exactly what to say. “Maintenance” still takes us a (“ridiculously”) long time (especially Gary, of course), but progress is being made slowly but surely. Most of “my time” I’ve been spending on revising my story (or at least, staring at the pages while ripping my hair out). Sometimes I like my writing, sometimes I don’t. I am “worried” about the characters, that people aren’t going to like reading about them. I think I may have to write under a pseudonym. Or at least put a disclaimer to my family: “I am not any of these characters and neither are you so don’t worry about it.” Sometimes I think I should go back to fanfic ;-) I wish I could write the story faster.

These past few weeks I haven’t been spending time organizing the house, because, frankly, that isn’t fun and I was in need of some serious fun (which, despite my moaning, writing is). I had planned to get back to some organizing last week, but then I got ill and I didn’t feel like doing much of anything, I was so tired. I am still not quite recovered. Our major goal in the organizing respect is to clear the gardening stuff from the “dining” room and put it in the garage. That would give more room in there for Gary to have things he would like to get to handy. My other “major” goal is to get my books organized, and I still haven’t gotten around to that.

The housekeeper seems to be working out fairly well.

Neither of us have gotten on the futon and watched TV. Gary watches the news or sports when he does his elastic band exercises on non-therapy days. I haven’t turned the TV on at all. As I said, “my time” is mainly spent on my writing, “our time” on maintenance stuff, “his (non-maintenance) time” on therapy or work-related stuff or whatever else he is doing that he isn’t telling me about ;-). When the time needed for his maintenance activities goes down, then I presume we can get a little “joint leisure” in there (which right now only seems to consist of grocery shopping, if you call that a leisure activity ;-)), but I don’t expect that to be for awhile – not until his flap restrictions are lifted or modified, and the soonest that would happen is the last week of November when he sees the “flap doc.”

So, let me know if there is anything you are curious about that you’d like to read about in the blog :-)