Couch Life, Continued

Well…today was yet another day on the couch for me. This routine of getting up, having a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast (I love oatmeal and am not complaining about the oatmeal), going to my couch, staying on my couch for a couple of hours, eating lunch, returning to the couch for afternoon couch activities, eating dinner, returning to the couch for evening dinner activities and going to bed has already started getting a bit old.

Except, of course, for the exceptions.

I'm still not running on full energy, limiting the amount of stuff I can do. As a general rule, the day after an outing (outing being here defined as getting in the car to be wheeled around somewhere in the wheelchair before getting back in the car to return home), I'm dead tired and do nothing but try not to fall asleep on the couch. As a general rule, showers have a similar effect on me.

The trick with outings and showers is, I'm starting to sense that they are necessary components of my life. Showers because I greatly enjoy being clean and outings because I can really only take so much time indoors.

Today marked some serious progress in my recovery because I was able to complete both a shower and an outing.

As my mother pointed out today, I have yet to discuss my showering routine on this blog. I think I will now. But, to preface, a discussion on my house. My house was built somewhere around 1900. Or at least early in the twentieth century—I'm not sure when. One of the great truths this experience has taught me is that buildings built sometime in the early twentieth century (or before then) were not designed with wheelchairs in mind.

To translate: on the ground floor, where I live, is my bed (which my parents moved into what is temporarily not my mother's office while I was in the hospital), my couch, the television, the kitchen, a bathroom and the dining room. There is no shower downstairs.

The shower is upstairs.

In order to get to the shower, I have to sit on the stairs and scuttle up like a crab, holding my leg (with frame) up as I go. This is not the most dignified way to go up stairs, but it is a lot easier than the alternative, which involves me leaning heavily on a parent and hopping on my good, frame-free leg. Then, once upstairs, I have to walker my way more or less all the way across the house. Then hop into the shower, where there is, mercifully, a stone bench I can sit on and use to keep the leg elevated. Whichever parent is helping me clean myself takes responsibility for the bad leg and for my back. I clean the rest of myself. And then it's back to the walker and back into crab position all the way down the stairs so I can recuperate on the couch.

The couch…it isn't like I have anything against the couch. It's a nice piece of furniture, well-made, sturdy, pretty comfortable. In fact, if you ask our golden retriever, Sunny, couches are gifts from the gods (Sunny has a thing for sleeping on the couches, and even though his mother does not approve, his stubborn insistence on sleeping on the couch earned him full couch dog rights until I came along with my frame and took over his couch. He was not impressed).

See? Not impressed.

My main problem with the couch is that, as a whole, it is a rather limiting environment, especially as I spend most of my time on the couch on my back with my leg propped up on several pillows. This is for several reasons:
1) the frame greatly appreciates not being dragged down by the fell force of gravity. I'm mostly off pain medicine now (did not take so much as a single Tylenol today—progress!) but my comfort is improved by not letting the two pound device yank down on my bones, and
2) the blister at the bottom of my foot has now gotten worse. Whereas it started off as a very painful looking pressure sore, it is now a clearly three-dimensional fluid-filled entity that could, theoretically speaking, burst at any moment. I know next to nothing about blisters, but apparently having the blister burst on me would not be a good thing (I can already feel the fluid inside building up a good deal of pressure, making any sort of foot motion a bit tricky). If it survives until my next post-op appointment Friday, we will be discussing its treatment with Dr. Sundberg. But at the moment, for the sake of caution, the foot remains elevated so the following thing does not get any worse:

Two things: 1) The pillow my foot is resting on was bought by my parents almost immediately after my return. It is a generously sized product from Target and I love it dearly, mostly because it's easier to position the frame on  larger pillows than it is to position the frame on smaller pillows. 2) My brother, who I wrangled into taking this photo, was not particularly amused and made faces which clearly explained how grossed out he was by this friendly protrusion on the bottom of my foot. While I apologize to him, I also thought the blister was worth documenting for this blog.

The blister has also greatly reduced the amount of time that foot can spend in a shoe. For instance, during today's outing, the foot was encased in a slipper. Really, it wasn't that big a deal, but at the same time…I've got a bulky piece of hardware strapped to my lower leg already. The more I can return to normalcy, the better.

Today's outing, despite the slipper detail, was a triumphant start to returning to normalcy. Now, at the beginning of this whole leg-and-frame process, Dr. Sundberg told me I'd probably miss school for roughly the entire month of January. At this point in time, it's safe to say that I'm recovering faster than initially expected (for instance: the amount of time I'll be spending in the frame will probably be closer to four months than the six we were initially told to anticipate). Last Friday, at my first post-op appointment, he cleared me to return as soon as I could. While I still don't have the energy to make it back to school, I will soon.

Which brings me to today's outing. Like my house, my school was built in the early twentieth century (I think it was actually built in the year 1900). While there are a number of features in the school designed to increase handicap accessibility, it still made sense to tour the building with me in my wheelchair.

A word about the wheelchair: From my perspective, my current wheelchair isn't half-bad. It rides reasonably smoothly and I can get into and out of it fairly easily. From the perspective of everybody else, the thing is a nightmare: big, bulky, cumbersome, hard to maneuver. Things such as rugs present major obstacles when one is trying to cope with my wheelchair. There are lots of rugs on the first floor of my house, which is a problem. Also, despite having lived with the wheelchair for a week, the dogs have yet to figure out that the wheelchair is not a friend and still need to be scolded as I come by in my throne-on-wheels so their legs don't get run over and squished in a rather decisively unpleasant manner. Long story short, since the thing is so unwieldy, we figured it would make sense to take the wheelchair (with me in it) to school to test out my second semester schedule.

Step one: getting into the building. The parking lot was not as snow-free as the two other parking lots I've been in post-op. The wheels on the wheelchair went round and round in the slush and got rather disgusting.

Step two: navigating past hordes of people. We toured at 4:30 PM, a time when we (meaning myself, my parents and my grade dean) figured the building ought to be reasonable clear of people. Today, however, marked auditions for my school's spring play. Hence, hordes of thespians, all of whom were actually very willing to accommodate me and my wheelchair (and none of whom stared at the suspicious bulk under my sweatpants which is the frame). And many stopped to say hi, which was really nice. A note: after surgery (or, I'd imagine, any injury which takes you out of commission for a long-ish period of time, though I'm really only used to surgery), people saying hi, acknowledging you, feels really, really good.

Step three: discovering how handicap-accessible the building was. The answer: surprisingly, not bad. There are a couple ramps thrown into the mix which can all be navigated with my leg extender all the way out. The wheelchair fit into all of my classrooms. Apparently, each bathroom at the school has a handicap-accessible stall which looks like it would be exceedingly easy to use. The only major issues to report involve (surprise, surprise) the size of my wheelchair.

Which is to say, the thing barely fits in the elevators. Each elevator trip, I was afraid the doors would just refuse to shut and then much fuss would be necessary to get the doors to shut and the elevator trip to begin. I cannot say this was a problem I was anticipating. As a general rule, the elevators in my school are slow as death and make scary noises. I expected that. But for the wheelchair to barely fit… The good news is, we now know the moves to make the thing fit. Progress.

Also, there's a wheelchair lift to get into the math wing. From the beginning we knew that might not fit me (I even wrote an opinions piece about the lift for the school newspaper, wondering why there wasn't a ramp in its place instead, only to learn about a day too late for my article revisions to be printed that federal regulations would not allow a ramp in that space). The lift did not even come close to fitting the wheelchair. This is with both leg extenders down. Disappointing, to be sure, but at least now we know.

Step four: make sure the wheelchair is not too bulky for others to push around. One of my friends, who is on the smaller side of the spectrum, was there while we were testing out the school accessibility. Since the combination of Natcher, frame and wheelchair weighs in excess of 200 pounds, we tested out whether she could move the entire ensemble. It's possible.

My current goal is to return to school early next week, maybe. The good news is that my schedule is ridiculously easy this semester (only five classes (one of which is Creative Writing, which I more or less live and breathe to begin with), two free blocks) and I have lots of do-nothing time built into my school day. Which hopefully entails a full return soon?

But for now, I will remain on my couch and keep the foot elevated. In another note of progress, I returned today to doing casual for-myself reading (The Dead Zone by Stephen King…entertaining, if not his best, though it's been making for a great recovery read).

And at some point Sunny the unimpressed golden retriever will get the couch back all to himself.