Sunday, December 30, 2007

Breaking out into the real world

Today I went on another outing, this one for an hour. I hopped into the car with Bryan, not exactly knowing where we were going... and suggested we head to Milford. We went to a cafe at the mall, and had to queue for a long time for a coffee in a small space. I was a bit nervous as the waitress kept sort of pushing past people to get through, and there wasn't really anywhere to go. Bryan stood quite close so that I would be sheilded from being bumped. After coffee, we headed to the stationary shop for some refil pages for my photo albums. I spent all of yesterday organising my photos from this year and last year, and ordered 160 photos. Weirdly, the photo album pages are going to be way more expensive than the photos.

Physically I'm feeling much better, I lasted an hour out today, and hadn't taken any pain relief today or yesterday (other than an anti-inflamitory). It's been feeling better than much of the time pre-op, which is something! If 3 weeks post op I'm in less pain than I had been, it's pretty telling of how bad it had been. I walked to the dairy yesterday unattended, after putting my foot down. I am finding it difficult being followed around everywhere like some fragile thing that might suddenly swoon. I guess that's a good thing! I have realised how independent I am.

The challenge is finding things to keep me occupied.

No comments:

Pre-op 2000

Pre-op 2000
This is before I had any surgery on my back. It's looking at it front on. You can see the base of the spine is where it connects to my pelvis, and then how the top is out of line with the bottom, This made it look like I had one big hip, because my ribcage was off to one side.

Pre-op 2007

Pre-op 2007
Here is how my spine looks now, you can see that the part that has the rods is straight, then at the top the unfused part goes off at a different angle. The surgery tomorrow is to fix that, by putting a rod from about 2 vertebrae up and 3 or 4 below the junction.