I had my open-heart surgery on 9/30, came home from the hospital on 10/4, and have been a good boy at following the rules since then. I’m healing well since the surgery.
But now the negative effects of my 9/3 stroke. Typing is still very hard, and a little painful. So this will be a short post. Hopefully I’ll soon be able to type more, and to report more specifically on my health and activities.
Sometimes you pick up a book and don’t remember where you got it. This one we seem to have picked up in a thrift store named “Heart & Hand” for the inflated price of 91¢! It’s from a land Far, Far Away: Letters From the Front Line of the War On Terror by Wes Trueblood. He served as an English teacher, a civilian employee for the US Military. Earlier in his life, Trueblood had been in the military. In one letter he mentioned he was “no longer an ordained minister”, so that’s also an item on his resume.
The book is a series of letters Trueblood wrote to a mailing list back home—family, friends, and friends of friends. The letters told his impressions of the countries he went to: first Iraq in 2007, then after a year in the USA, to Afghanistan in 2009. The book looked interesting especially due to our time in Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
In terms of information, the book did not disappoint. Trueblood’s impressions and conclusions about the two countries pretty much match my own. He was hampered in learning about the countries because he was essentially in a war zone and could not get out among the local population.
Thus he gave a lot of information about the bases he was at. Who lived with him, as roommate and as other base residents? What were the site rules? What type of recreation did they have? Were they in danger? After a while, it got tiring. Trueblood kept trying to distinguish between miliary people and civilians (such as him) who worked for the military. Those parts became kind of boring after a while. I read them all, but not closely enough to really understand the differences.
One other problem was that the “letters” were really a newsletter sent by e-mail. It reads differently than letters do. That was a little off-putting for me.
So, should you read this book? is it a keeper? How do I rate it? I think you would have to ha e a special interest in these countries or in this part of the world to make this book worth your while. It is now a keeper for me, and will go straight out to the donation pile. And I rate only 3-stars. It is really 3.5 stars for me. It’s well put together, and I’m glad I read it, but the stars rating is for others, not for me.
A couple of month ago, I posted that I was reading The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of poet William Wordsworth. These are famous journals in the world of poetry, specifically in the British romantic movement era. I read this slowly, about five or six pages a day at my noon reading time, either in the sunroom or at my reading spot in the woods.
I must admit to having a difficult time concentrating on this book. Dorothy’s main entries had to do with the weather, where they walked and who they saw, what letters they received and who she wrote to. Sometimes she wrote about household items, such as making pies and bread, doing laundry. Many entries had to do with health issues. Both Dorothy and William were frequently ill and spent much of their days in bed, to rise at supper time then be up most of the night.
William’s poetry does figures in the journal, which is what most interested me. Dorothy sometimes wrote, “W is working on an ode” or “W is working on a sonnet.” Sometimes she would give the name of a poem. “Peter Bell” is mentioned quite often at one stretch. It makes me want to pull out my Wordsworth poems books (I think I have two) and read them.
Place names feature in terms of where they walked or rode to. The book included two maps, but so many of the places mentioned weren’t shown on the maps that I gave up referring to them. Coleridge also features in the journal. He came and went frequently, went away from his wife right when she was about to give birth. The impression Dorothy gives of Coleridge is not flattering.
The book included 140 pages of notes, printed as end notes tied to a page and a journal date. I started out reading the journal entry then flipping back to the notes. I gave up on that when I came to realize the notes more often than not compared this edition of the journal (2002, edited by Pamela Wolf) to earlier editions (stretching back over 130 years). That kind of information would be of great interest to a researcher, but not so much to a casual reader such as me.
So, on to my usual questions. How do rate this? Will I read it again? What will I do with the book? The extensive notes and lack of an adequate map cause me to rate this 3-stars. No, I don’t think I will ever read it again; thus I don’t plan on keeping it. It is already put in the donation pile.
Writing this post ahead of time. It ought to be and end-of-month progress, beginning-of-month goals post. But due to my stroke on September 3, I had almost no progress. And due to my heart surgery today, I’m not making any goals for October.
I’m writing this post early, to go live on September 30, at the exact time my surgery is supposed to start. I have a few more posts scheduled to go lived on my normal blogging schedule. I suspect my first post-surgery live post will be somewhere around the middle of October.
The impacts of my stroke:
Hopefully I will be more diligent at working on the remaining impairments. Possibly I’ll give a follow-up report on Friday. Meanwhile, I have no thoughts of resuming writing. It’s a good thing my only current writing work is scanning photos and loading them into a book of family letters.
Folks, I was away from the blog due having another stroke on 9/3, being in the hospital for 14 days (including in-patient rehab). My left side was affected, the most lingering of which is loss of fine motor skills in my left hand. Consequently, I can barely type. I’ll see what I can do come Monday.
Well, August was another strange month, as I continued to recover from the two freak household accidents I had in July. While my output was certainly affected, I wasn’t shut down from some progress. Here’s how I did relative to my goals.
September will be an odd month. My heart surgery will be on Sept 30, and I have lots of pre-op stuff before that. So I don’t plan on any writing this month. Publishing tasks will take precedence.
That’s it, and it may be more than I can accomplish. But it’s better to have a goal that requires you to work hard and efficiently.
When I hurt my right leg in the freak home accident on July 15, I found immediate difficulties in maintaining my normal routine. Each step I took was extremely painful. The accident happened mid-morning, after I had finished about half my daily time in The Dungeon. That’s the computer room in the basement where I do almost all my writing, and other projects. But I could tell it would be too painful to go back downstairs. I finished the day away from The Dungeon and away from my laptop.
The next day, after sleeping (not very well) in an easy chair all night, I knew I needed to get to The Dungeon, at least for an hour or two, work there, then bring my laptop upstairs. I had begun using a walker upstairs, and could see it would be too difficult to carry downstairs. Walking downstairs was going to be impossible. I could ask my wife to go down to get my laptop, but I didn’t really want to ask that of her. What was I going to do? How could I get to The Dungeon?
I got there by walking backwards downstairs on all fours. That took some of the weight off my bad leg. It gave me stability going down the staircase. I actually went down fairly quickly. But then there were the fifteen steps to my computer desk, with a slight deviation to switch on the light. Once I was in my seat, I was okay. But the getting across the floor was very hard. When it was time to get breakfast, I went up the stairs on all fours, then once again went down and over—in much pain. I could tell it wasn’t working.
So after an hour, I took my laptop with me and said goodbye to The Dungeon, promising to be back as soon as my leg healed enough to walk on it and go up and down stairs as a normal person. My easy chair in the living room—the same chair I slept in—became my office. Needless to say, my productivity suffered. In the same time I could write 1,000 words in The Dungeon, I was lucky to get four or five hundred in my chair. I prayed for healing and productivity through unusual circumstances.
In my reading recently, I saw where Virginia Woolf, in a letter to a friend, sort of commented on this.
But to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.
I felt like that was me. To finish a Bible study book in an easy chair, with a laptop on my lap, not on a desk, forty-five feet and twelve stair steps away from my usual working space, would be difficult. But not impossible. I finished the round of edits to the Bible study, set it aside, and moved on to my next project. I slowly gained a measure of productivity and got things done.
But healing did come to my injured leg. I was finally able, last Sunday, to sleep on a bed. Monday too. So Tuesday morning, I grabbed my laptop and wireless mouse, leaving my coffee behind, and walked down to The Dungeon with no trouble and no pain. By Thursday, I was able to make the trip with computer and coffee.
So I’m back at my retirement work: writing books; trying to figure out how to sell them; trading stocks; and working on downsizing. My leg is not quite fully healed, but six weeks after the injury, it has healed enough for me to say, “Hello, Dungeon! It’s business almost as usual.”
A week ago I wrote a post about the two projects I was working on. I’m pleased to report that I finished one of those on Saturday.
But I need to qualify that. I finished the words part of the project. And I did a small amount of proofreading on Sunday, so I guess I should say Sunday was my completion day. I’d better explain.
The project was the book of letters during our years in Saudi Arabia, 1981-83. As I explained before, we didn’t have a phone in our apartment, had limited access to the office phone for personal calls (expensive and inconvenient), so we wrote letters home. Our parents, grandparents, and others kept most of them, and now we have them. In addition, we have some that were written to us from home. We must have brought those back with us when we were repatriated.
The collection, as it currently stands, is 191 items. I say “items” instead of letters, and “currently stands” because the collection includes a few things that aren’t letters, such as envelopes of receipts from some of our travels. Also, we have a number of empty envelopes in our files, addressed to a parent. The letters themselves were removed and are presumed lost. Or are they around the house somewhere?
This project actually began somewhere arounds 2008, I think it was. I gathered all the Saudi letters together, collated them, and began to transcribe them to a Word document. As I did, I left the letters out of the envelopes and put them opened flat in a folder, thinking that was a better way to preserve them. Later, as I studied how letter collections were gathered and preserved, I realized they should be left in the envelopes. So a few years later I returned them to the envelopes.
Or did I? Problem is, I remember finding the folder and seeing the letters laid flat and the envelopes on top, but I don’t actually remember ever putting them in the envelopes. Did I do it? I don’t have a list of which letters I transcribed, and the computer file is long gone from various computer upgrades. It makes me wonder if that folder is still there, buried beneath a pile of other things, waiting for me to do my work.
No matter right now. Today I have set aside some time to look for that folder and see if there are other letters to collate and transcribe. I don’t think there are, but we’ll see.
This was a fun, if often tedious project. The document I’ve created is over 109,000 words and spans 190 8.5×11 pages. It includes a four page Introduction, a list of the letters, and a list of correspondents. The only words that are missing are those that will go on the Copyright page. Well, that, and whatever captions I add to pictures once I get them added to the book.
Yes, I intend to publish it. It’s just for family, a way to preserve some of our history. But I’ll publish it as a paperback to Amazon, print off a few copies for family, then un-publish it. It will remain on my Amazon author’s bookshelf, ready to be re-published should some family want more copies (such as my grandchildren when they are older).
So the next step is to generously illustrate the book with photos. I plan on using some time in the afternoons over the next couple of weeks to go through the mountain of photos we have, select 50 or so good ones (maybe more), scan them, load them into the book. Then all that’s left is converting the Word file into the correct size pages for publishing, moving the photos to the right place, adding captions, make a suitable cover, and publish it.
No, that’s not a quick and easy task. But I’ve already done that once with the letters from our years in Kuwait, so I sort of know the drill. Moving photos into place is actually kind of easy. The final sizing and positioning takes some care, but it’s quite doable.
That’s my afternoon job over the next couple of weeks.
My morning job? The will be picking up again A Walk Through Holy Week, Volume 2, and doing the next round of edits. I’m not really sure how long that will take me. Could be a week, could be two. I’ll also have to decide if I need another round of edits before moving on to publishing tasks.
I felt a great weight fall from my shoulders on Saturday when I typed the last words in the Saudi letters book. It’s good to see it reach this milestone.
Yes, the healing is coming. If you are a new reader and want to know something of the physical trials I’ve been going through, this post will tell you what I expected to happen, this post will tell you something about the curve ball that came, and this post will give you some idea of where I was a week or so ago. I won’t call it a thrilling path I’ve been walking on. Maybe interesting, or truly a trial is a better description.
Since my post last Friday, the healing in my right leg has accelerated. By yesterday morning, I felt no pain in my leg at all—except the ongoing pain in my right knee that was way before my July 15 freak home accident. I went to the orthopedic doctor yesterday. He was pleased with my healing, crediting it to a combo of the steroid shot, and staying off it as much as I could to allow natural healing to take place. I suspect he’s right.
So yesterday I stopped by our Wal-Mart pharmacy on the way home to pick up a couple of prescriptions. I was feeling so good I decided I would go in without my walker. I had just told the doctor I was still using the walker when out and about, and he said that was a good idea until I could sense complete healing had arrived. But I wanted to give it a try. I made it in fine, had almost no wait, and so was back to where I parked in a handicapped area with the minimum possible steps in the minimum possible time. But, in fact my leg hurt a little by the time I got to the car. So, I guess I do need the walker a while longer.
But the healing in my right leg is on the right trajectory. I suspect that in a week I’ll be ready to tell the heart surgeon that I’m ready for the valve replacement.
Alas, for my left shoulder, hurt in a different freak home accident around July 18 or 19, there is less healing. I have no improvement in strength, no lessening of pain when moving it, no increase in the activities I can do. While we are waiting on the results of the MRI on Monday, he’s pretty sure surgery will be required. But that injury is not holding up my heart surgery. I’ll get through the heart hospitalization and recuperation, including whatever rehab I’ll have, then see about my shoulder probably sometime in 2025.
That’s the health news. Hopefully I’ll have writing news in the next couple of posts.