The knee is better now. So is the blood pressure and racing pulse. The steroid shot that made the knee so much better so fast… It hardly ever has any side effects… Except when it makes your blood pressure 166/93 and pulse rate 119. Light-headedness and a headach to go with it. That was enough to prompt a call to the doctor for a follow-up. The doctor advised us to give it some time and check back if it wasn’t better. My pulse rate this morning was 56, less than half the rate Judy’s was at its high. Happily, Judy’s pulse rate is now back down to 72. That’s about normal for her.
The 33rd America’s Cup
Every four years or so, they race. They’ve been doing this since 1851. Typically, the teams sail almost traditional looking single hull racing yachts. Each time, however, the winning team gets to make up the rules for the next competition. This time, the competitors look radically different from previous generations of boats. There will be a giant catamaran versus a giant trimaran capable of sporting a fixed vertical wing instead of a fabric sail; a wing that stands over 200 feet high (twice as big as the wing of a Boeing 747)! http://www.americascup.com/en/lieu/valence-espagne/valencia-15-909 If you follow the links for “The Actors” and click on Alinghi or BMW Oracle, you get access to the teams and the boats and some spectacular photos: http://www.americascup.com/en/acteurs/alinghi/presentation-55-43 http://www.americascup.com/en/acteurs/bmw-oracle/presentation-56-44 This America’s Cup is going to be totally different! (It starts Monday and it’s only two or three races; the best two out of three.) It’s going to be broadcast to the world, hundreds of millions of people, but I don’t know if they’ve settled on a U.S. television carrier yet. It will at least be available live on the internet.
Satellite dish follow-up
We’ve been in Harlingen, not because we wanted to be there, but because that’s where we needed to be to get the television satellite dish fixed. The part came yesterday. The rain stopped this morning. Ken, the repair guy, fixed the stuff on the roof, loaded updated software on the controller in the cabinet, and everything is fixed!
It’s odd the way some RV Parks are set up. They have cement pads, but you don’t park your rig on the pad, you park on the grass next to it and the pad is your patio. No problem, unless of course it rains for days.
An RV could get stuck trying to leave. That didn’t happen to us though. We just drove right out.
We have the month of February reserved at a different place down here in the valley, so off we went this afternoon to claim our spot at Sandpipers. We’ll stay here the rest of the month.
I made a new map link to show our winter travels:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=107013362562471418011.00047ebbf84effdf77693&ll=27.488781,-97.514648&spn=4.160685,9.832764&z=7
We have the month of February reserved at a different place down here in the valley, so off we went this afternoon to claim our spot at Sandpipers. We’ll stay here the rest of the month.
I made a new map link to show our winter travels:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=107013362562471418011.00047ebbf84effdf77693&ll=27.488781,-97.514648&spn=4.160685,9.832764&z=7
More knee
A visit to the orthopedist today. The injury is probably a meniscus tear, but as a result of two previous knee surgeries in 1999 and 2002, Judy probably doesn’t have enough meniscus left to trim any more off. A steroid shot to the knee calmed things down; at least for a while. As long as the knee doesn’t lock up, there probably won’t be any surgery to fix it. We’ll follow-up with the orthopedist in Corpus Christi next month if we need to.
Knee follow-up
We take this knee issue to be a torn meniscus. It happened before, a few years ago, so it is familiar. It feels like an emergency. The doctors here don’t see it that way though. Judy’s knee is only painful, not life-threatening. This area is filled with Winter Texans. Maybe the doctors are too busy replacing hips and knees to do a little arthroscopic surgery. Judy kept after it. Finally, this afternoon, one of the doctors relented and we have an appointment for tomorrow morning.