A Reluctant Progress Report

I haven’t really written about my various aches and pains for quite a while, for a couple of reasons. First, because I know that there are plenty of folks worse off than me, and second, because nobody wants to hear about it. . . .or so I thought. But a good friend of mine, author Andrew Fielding *, says I’m wrong about that. He feels that a lot of regulars are interested, so I guess I will go ahead and update everybody who’s curious. If you don’t particularly care, or this is more detail than you want, feel free to skim over all this and go down to the fun video at the bottom. You won’t hurt my feelings.

Just a quick recap first. My heart surgery last year was successful but it was long and complicated, which ended up knocking my kidneys out, necessitating regular dialysis. (My kidneys were fine before but this does happen sometimes. Lucky me.) Later in the year I stupidly fell and broke my hip, got an artificial joint installed, and have been working back from that ever since. Mobility is my ongoing challenge. I’ve gone from wheelchair to walker to cane, back to wheelchair again and am now on a walker, moving slowly (and painfully) and trying to build up my stamina.

At some point during all this I had cataract surgery in both eyes, and also transitioned from the kind of dialysis they do in a clinic to home dialysis, which occurs while I sleep. Now it’s turning out that I might be one of the minority that doesn’t do well on home dialysis, so could end up back at the clinic. (Four-hour sessions three days a week.)

This is just about the most complete picture I can give you without going into gruesome detail, which – trust me – you don’t want. If anything changes drastically I’ll pass it along, otherwise I’m just biding my time and hoping to emulate the guy in the video below.

* We reviewed his book, The Lucky Strike Papers, back in 2008.