Still Life with Leg Wound

I took this photo today. I dug up my first potatoes (ever!) and got so excited that I forgot how much my leg was aching. I got out the camera for a little shot with the ruler, cuke, and first spuds, and threw my leg in there at the last moment. For more pix of the potatoes, click here.

Latest Leg Photo

It has now been ten weeks since my leg surgery. The surgical wound is still not quite healed. Here's a photo I took this morning. (Click here for others.)

On August 20, Dr. Jacobs gave me permission to resume swimming and even dancing. It was the best news I'd heard in a million years.

I still have to use the Normatec device for several hours every day. Each time I use it, even for just half an hour, more stuff oozes out of the surgical wound on my leg. This weirds me out a little, but I take my cues from the doctors I trust, and if they're not worried, then I try not to worry either.

No worries. :-)

Halleluyah, Praise the Lord, I Can Drive

I was stuck for a ride to this morning's physical-therapy appointment, so I decided to try driving my own car. This was the first time I've tried to drive a stick-shift since my leg surgery.

(Giant Thank You to William Pike for swapping me his automatic car for two weeks last month, and also to Tom Luongo for the same favor for a few days last week.)

This morning was a good time for such a test: not rush hour, not far, not new, not late enough in the day for my ankle to have swelled too much in advance. (Even better timing would have been on a less humid day and under less time pressure.)

Although my ankle hurt during the appointment, undoubtedly from driving my car, the convenience of being able to provide my own transportation felt nothing less than miraculous.
After I was done shouting Halleluyah I recited the She-heHeyanu. And when I got home I took heavier pain and swelling meds than usual, and rushed my leg back into the Machine for a little while.

The Hebrew word "Halleluyah" really does mean "Praise the Lord." Hallelu is the plural imperative form of the verb to praise, and Yah is one of Gd's many Hebrew names. Praise Gd, Y'all.

Bowel Blockage

Ouch, today I'm suffering from a bowel blockage. It is excruciating. This one has been going on since about 7 AM. It's very serious, actually life-threatening. But I'm afraid to go to the ER because the first thing they'll do is pump my stomach using the dreaded NG (nasal-gastric) tube. I'd almost rather die than submit to that again. My rule of thumb is that if the blockage goes on for more than 24 hours, I promise to find a ride to the ER. Fortunately this blockage seems headed for self-resolution before the 24-hour mark, which means I have once again successfully avoided the ER.

This can happen to anyone, including people with full, normal, functioning digestive tracts, but I never had it before I lost my colon. I've learned that there's so much more room in my lower torso minus that large organ that there's now space in which my small intestine can get kinked and twisted. This is why people who've had complete colectomies get bowel blockages more often.

This is the first one I've had since my leg surgery. Thank goodness I can walk enough to do some of the right things for the blockage, like heat up the Bed Buddy in the microwave for applying heat to my mid-section, and carry it into the other room where I can lie down on the couch. I also made hot, sweetened tea for slow sipping. I couldn't have done any of this by myself during the first two weeks after the leg surgery. Thank Gd it didn't happen then!

One of the other blockage-management tools is to take a hot bath, but I'm not allowed to immerse my leg yet, so that option was out.

What caused this particular blockage? Must be something I ate. Most likely it was those innocent-seeming beets I polished off yesterday evening. When will I ever learn: Do not eat beets after 1 PM, Natasha! Or, if I must, at least eat them in tiny quantities only. Hard to remember when I love them so much.

Imagine Feeling Like Yourself Again

So, get this: Dr. Jacobs wants me to bring my cowboy boots to my next Normatec appointment! With appropriate socks and everything!!! Of course, I had to wonder, aloud, which cowboy boots? The red ones? The green ones? The black ones? (I didn't even mention the original brown ones, or the Dan-Post multicolored ones, or the blue ropers.) Hm, I'm thinking maybe the red ones. Nurse Mary said she wants to see the whole outfit.

Well, the Normatec brochure does say, right up front: "Imagine feeling like yourself again."

My First Squat Toilet

[This is my first posting about guts.]

The first place I ever saw a squat toilet was in Tokyo. In the airport bathroom, May, 1982. Long rows of stalls in the women's room, just like in any American airport bathroom. But each stall door had a label, either "Western toilet" or "non-Western toilet." If I remember correctly, there were about equal numbers of each! I was seventeen years old, had never heard of squatting or anything. I was overcome with curiosity about what a non-Western toilet could possibly be and peeked behind one of those doors to find out. A single glance at a white porcelain flat thing on the floor was enough to scare me and I fled to a Western toilet. (I had just been diagnosed with colitis the year before; I think my bowel problems were beginning to affect me by this point in time.)

Eleven years later, somewhere in the Atlas mountains of Morocco, I finally used a squat toilet for the first time in my life, and it wasn't by choice. In colitis-related desperation I had found myself in a really icky, dirty, rural, impoverished dark place, with a flushable hole in the ground and a bucket of water, to which I had been ushered by a non-French-speaking Moroccan man. I remember being worried about germs, infection, disease, kidnapping, etc. So imagine my surprise when, upon "relieving myself" there, I found myself thinking: "Wow, that was so much easier and less painful than on the toilets at home!"

Nurse says don't worry about a little seepage

[NOTE: I finally realized: If I wait till I have time to spell out the entire history of my leg (nerve damage from 2002 accident) and my jpouch (fake guts), this blog will never happen! So instead, here's what I would have written today even if I had been keeping up better.]


I called Nurse Mary at Normatec this afternoon. She said it's okay to pump for my remaining 15 minutes today as long as I'm pretty sure that the one seeping end of the incision is not infected. She suggested that I put some gauze over the incision while pumping, to absorb whatever is leaking out. We both took succor from the fact that Dr. Upton will be seeing it in less than 24 hours. (If you would like to see photos of my leg, including two from yesterday, click here.)

When I met with Dr. Laura Jacobs (inventor of the Pneumatic Compression Device) on July 23, she was certain that Upton will take out the sutures tomorrow, based on seeing my incision and knowing that it will have been five weeks since my surgery.

So now I'm worrying that a) digging the sutures out of the way-healed skin at one end of the incision is going to hurt; and b) removing them from the seeping end is going to lead to a new gaping hole in my leg, like what happened during summer of 2003. A repeat of that experience is still the thing I most fear in life. (Someday soon I hope to stop rehearsing this worry.)

Well, I'll just have to trust him to know what the right thing to do is.

Speaking of sutures, I'm currently wondering: Can he remove some stitches but not others? Or are they all connected, like a basted hem? And what's up with that one suture on the back of my calf, where there was never any injury to begin with? It can't be connected to the others, can it? That would be so gross. I hope to get answers to these and other mysteries at tomorrow's appointment.