April 22 - Wild Nights

I'm going to keep this one short as it was a rather uneventful and I am a bit behind in my posts, email, phone calls, okay, a lot of excuses but I do need a break.

I've not been doing PT because we needed to make sure the redness in my stump (I still prefer "residual limb" but it takes longer to type) was not inflammation but because it had been down too much.

Some very good news is the leg has cleared up with only a tiny bit of redness and a drop or two of blood evident at on a couple of sutures.

My mood is better, the impatience is gone, and I am sleeping longer with 3 or 4 pit stops during the night to take a pill or big boy business.

My office sent us a turkey breast from Heavenly Ham. Management has been 100% supportive of my decision to get an amputation as well as my running over the years, allowing me to run at lunchtime during the winter months. A great place to work and I am hoping the housing market ease soon so we get busy again...as busy as a one legged man in a butt-kicking contest. Yeah, we have the personnel to do that!

My foot discomfort mainly consists of phantom sensations along with an occasional twitch of the calf muscle near the distal end of the residuum. I am taking the drug neurontin for the phantom pains, not sure right now it is effective for me. I can feel my heel as I write this; also have a moderate burning sensation on the ball of the invisible foot and various itchy spots, etc. I have found if I gently massage the stump it helps relieves the discomfort a bit.

The worst pain is when I put my stump straight down after it's been up a while. The blood rushes to a place that is being actively healing, and for maybe 10 minutes I am one unhappy camper. The good news is this does stop hand-banging hurting unlike my other surgery which was determined to set some sort of endurance record for pain, pounding me for about 4 weeks before it started easing up a bit. The only good thing I can say about the pain management for my first operation is it gives me a reference to compare the amputation to. My surgeon said this would be easier and I would recover faster and so far he is spot on.

It took me a little while to go to sleep. I was trying to catch up on my correspondence and this blog and went to bed some time after my wife. My personal bedtime quirks is I am usually feel warm when I go to sleep and cool when I wake; I start with just the sheet and as my molten core cools I add blanket(s) or cats until warm. My feet are very toasty and I usually pull the covers above them...so last night my phantom toes were on fire and even with the covers pulled above my stump they were not appeased. I felt the need to douse them with cool water but I was convinced that would not have the desired affect either. So I lay there for a long time with my missing piggies having a virtual barbecue somewhere south of my stump.

Glad I didn't stick around that party, somewhere I eased into the arms of a deep and peaceful sleep, only disturbed by the need to: pee, pee, take pain pill, pee, take neurontin, pee, get up.

Wild nights indeed.

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My friend Eric's surgery an initial report is: no cancer! OMG what good news that was! I know he and his family shared a few good tears, those sparse tears of joy. I can't wait until I see them again, they are a close knit family and now that bond is tighter yet. Love is like gravity, unseen but powerful enough to bend light.