Author: Steve

…the face of this forest creature?

It’s a little dirty.

A nine-banded armadillo.

Day three post-surgery.

Shoulder surgery is tough.  It’s a painful recovery.  Having made it through the first two days though, Judy is noticeably better today.  Better enough to get out of the recliner and be restless a little.  Better enough to go out for a walk around the neighborhood.

We’re led to believe that sleep, ice, and painkillers are the best medicines at this point.  Whatever sleep Judy is not getting at night, she’s making up for as she naps herself through the day.  We’ve got various gel-packs of ice to alternate on her shoulder.  Sleep, ice, and painkillers.  Narcotics are out because Judy doesn’t do well with them, so her painkiller of choice is Advil.  Five more days to the follow-up with the doctor next Thursday.  The bandages should come off and the stitches should come out.  He’ll tell us then when we can start physical therapy.

I’m for it!

Who wouldn’t like that; healthcare for all?  What?  The employees who like their employer provided healthcare and don’t want to give it up?  Oh.  Who else?  The taxpayers who will be asked to pay more to support healthcare for all?  Anyone else?  Oh, all the people who work in the health insurance industry that don’t want to get put out of work?  And the doctors who don’t like the Medicare level of payment for services versus the private pay?  And the hospitals whose entire cost structure is built on getting more from private pay than from Medicare?  Okay, so there are a few issues.

There are so many reasons for not going to single payer, or healthcare for all, but isn’t it unconscionable to maintain that some people in our country can get medical insurance and others can’t; to continue to deny an entire segment of our population affordable access to healthcare?  We have to take the opposite approach.  We throw out all the objections; all the reasons why we can’t do universal healthcare and start with the commitment that we *can*.  We are not the only country that has faced this issue; we’re just the only developed nation that hasn’t found its own solution.

In plain sight.

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I was just walking along in the woods.

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No idea there was a screech-owl box there.

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With a motionless owl.

Just having a snooze in the middle of the day.

The two pictures kind of look the same.

Except in one she has a sling and is a little loopier, and in less pain, than in the other.

We’re having a comfortable evening and today’s anesthesia is gradually wearing off.  The story might be a little different tomorrow as the implanted painkillers wear off too.  The surgeon did a lot.  The cuff was torn in two pieces.  He sewed them back together, then gave them two new attachment points on the bone.  He fixed an inflamed bursa and tendon.  He cleaned up some arthritis.  He removed a bone spur.  He excised a lipoma.  Originally, he thought the lump on top of her shoulder might be a lipoma, but it didn’t show up as a lipoma on the MRI, so he had to conclude it must be something else; but when he got inside it just looked like a lipoma so he took it out.  He thought a biceps tendon might need repairing or cutting, but it didn’t because it was already gone.  It must have been clipped off in a previous surgery.  It’s one of those situations where you have two different tendons doing the same thing and you only really need one.  Just like John Elway.  We thought it was a catastrophe when, in the middle of his career, he blew a tendon in his throwing arm, but it was the same tendon as this.  They never repaired it and it had no effect on his throwing motion, so from that lesson we can expect that Judy’s throwing motion won’t change at all.