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 hematomas from the hospital blood draws have mostly healed. But next Monday I get to do it all over again.
The impacts of my stroke:
Left side weakness: mostly gone. But this has exposed the fact that my right leg is still weak from my July 15 accident. I’m still working on that.
Left side loss of balance: seems to be gone.
Double vision: affected the middle distances, seems to be gone.
Loss of left side fine motor skills: still greatly impaired. Can’t write. If I tried to write a check the bank would reject it based on unreadable handwriting. Practiced writing some yesterday, and it had improved a little since my last practice on 9/16. Touch-typing is slowly coming back. I’m no where up to the speed I used to be at, but I’m better than at OT on 9/11. Of course, with my bad rotator cuff from my other July accident, who can for sure tell what is an impact of that and what is from the stroke.
Speech: slow to come back. Still hard to say certain sounds. I have not worked on this enough, but it’s painful and tiring to talk out loud. I sang at church yesterday. Fortunately, the noise level in the sanctuary was such that no one could hear me, and I couldn’t hear myself. The words seemed to come easy to the two familiar songs, much harder on the new song.
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.
Vol. 2 may be published this month—if I can make my goal.
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.
Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. Did this. I had lots to write about.
I’m not making a goal of attending any writers meetings, partly from not knowing how my surgery and illnesses will lay me up, and partly because one meeting may be cancelled due to lack of a venue. I went to one meeting.
Complete two editorial passes through A Walk Through Holy Week, Vol 2. I managed to do this. Actually, I made three editorial passes through and have declared it “Done”. Publishing tasks to follow.
Figure out any final changes to the latest Danny Tompkins story, then finish and publish it. Did this, and published the short story on Aug 5. Made changes to it over the next few days.
Complete the commentary between letters. If I can get that done, begin selection of photos and insert them in the book. Did this. Completed commentary, Introduction, proofreading the letters and commentary, and started selecting photos.
And, one more for good measure: Make a start at outlining Vol 3 of A Walk Through Holy Week.Nope, did not work on this at all.
Hopefully, I’ll come very close to finishing my next book of expatriate year letters this month.
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.
Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays.
Attend three writing group meetings. I present at the one on Sept 10.
Complete publishing tasks for A Walk Through Holy Week, Vol. 2 and publish it to Amazon. I may have to do so with a temporary cover.
Complete adding photos to the Saudi years letters book. A really stretching-it goal would be to do enough formatting to order a review copy.
Spend at least a little time organizing Vol. 3 of A Walk Through Holy Week.
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.
Ah, back in The Dungeon as of Tuesday. Productivities improved in my familiar realm. Maybe Virginia Woolf was on to something.
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.”
This is how I’m storing the letters—at least for now. Not sure if I should find a more permanent container.
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.
Here are the little darlings, collated in their box.
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.
The Kuwait letters book served as the prototype for the other collections I’ve put together.
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.
And I did it with this collection as well, though it had only a handful of illustrations.
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.
While I’m laid up with accidents, I’m doing my best to get some writing work done. But when I say, “laid up,” I don’t mean lying flat on a bed doing nothing. I’m able to get around with a walker, to drive, attend church, pick up meds at the pharmacy. A couple of weeks ago I did a little yard work, and learned I wasn’t really ready for that. It probably set back my healing for a week.
But there are two things I enjoy doing that are easily done without putting weight on my feet: reading and writing.
I’ve done a fair amount of reading. For my morning devotional time, I read two prayers in Prayer That Avail Much. I’m a third of the way through this book, and mostly enjoying it. For enjoyment, I’m reading two books that are writing related. One is The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals by Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the famous British poet. I’m not sure I’m really enjoying this one. I’ll write more about this in a future book review. The third book I’m reading is Vol. 3 of The Letters of Virginia Woolf. I’m enjoying this one a little more, and will surely write a review of it.
As to writing, I’m working on two projects. One is A Walk Through Holy Week, Vol. 2. I finished this one about two weeks ago. I let it sit a while, then came back and did one editorial review of it. My plans are to let it sit for a week, then do one more editorial pass. I’m hoping at that time to call it “Done” and start publishing tasks. However, it’s possible I’ll still have areas in the book that will need more attention.
The other writing project is the book of letters from our years in Saudi Arabia. This book consists of handwritten letters transcribed into print. To those I added an Introduction and a little commentary along the way. That makes the words part of the book done and ready for proofreading. On Saturday and Sunday just passed, I proofread 57 of the book’s 186 pages. I’ll finish it this week. Then I have to find photos to illustrate it. After that will come publishing tasks and having a few copies made for family members. I hope to have that done when the family gathers for Thanksgiving.
So this is keeping me busy. I have other books lined up when these are done. And I have other writing projects waiting when these two are finished.
I might learn to like this life as a semi-invalid.
The first hematoma, before gravity pulled the blood down all the way down my forearm.
I wrote a post on July 8 about my upcoming heart surgery. At that time I thought it would probably be on July 22. Alas, as I posted on July 18, I injured my leg while lifting a heavy object at home. My surgeon didn’t want me dealing with two traumas at once. At first he put the surgery off to July 29, then, when I had little if any healing happening, but it off indefinitely, with us to touch base every two or three weeks. We did that early this week, and agreed I’m still not healed enough to set a surgery date.
The second hematoma, before gravity had its say on were the blood would go.
But actually, I have another trauma from another freak home accident. I reinjured my left shoulder on (I think) July 18. I reached my arms up to make a big stretch, and something big popped in my upper arm or shoulder. I both felt and heard the pop. This was the same shoulder that I injured when walking Nuisance, my son-in-law’s big dog. It never quite healed, even going through physical therapy. But, anyway, this pop happened. That day, while having blood drawn to recheck some enzymes that were high after my first accident, the guy that drew my blood put a tourniquet right over the place where the pop was. Iin a few days, my whole upper arm was one big subdural hematoma the kept growing for days.
For that second injury, and for the first, I went to an orthopedic doctor. He took some more x-rays, gave me a steroid shot in the groin, told me to take it easy, and not start the exercises the people at the orthopedic ER gave me. And come back in 2 to 3 weeks. His thoughts are that I have a badly torn rotator cuff, whereas the urgent care doc thought it was a torn deltoid muscle. Whatever it is, a second subdural hematoma had appeared (still growing), and I have almost no use of my left arm. Provided I can get it on a keyboard I can type, but have almost no range of motion, no strength. When my arm is still there’s no pain, but try to move it more than a couple of inches….
We are now in that period. I go to see him on 8/22. Meanwhile my regular doctor ordered an MRI of my left shoulder, currently scheduled for 8/26. Hopefully that will give some answers. I suspect an MRI of my right hip/leg/groin is also in my future.
As is my heart valve replacement surgery. Sometime. I suspect the earliest it can be is Sept 30. I say that because I am experiencing a little healing in my leg. The pain is not so intense. And I can now get my leg in positions where there’s no pain while at rest. I can cross my legs, with either one on top, and not have pain in my groin or thigh. The day is coming, I believe, when the healing will be enough for me to lie flat on a bed or stand fully upright without the pain coming. I’m not quite there yet, but that day is coming.
If there’s any good news through all of this, I’ve lost 12 pounds in just 24 days. I attribute it to being unable to easily access snacks in the house, or buy some at the grocery store. That puts me within 13 pounds of my target weight. Also, that puts my total loss from my peak weight (in 2006) of 102 pounds.
I had one more Danny Tompkins story to tell. Will this be the last.
My last post told about the latest of my Danny Tompkins stories. But I’m not sure I ever did a post explaining the full series and what my goals are for it. I think, with posting story #7, the series is done. But I thought that after #6, and years later I got the idea for the new story. So I guess I should say maybe it’s done, or maybe it isn’t.
The first story in the series is “Mom’s Letter”. I wrote this back around 2006. A fellow writer told me about a short story writing contest and encouraged me to enter. The word limit was rather short. My critique partners said the story wasn’t well enough developed, and I didn’t submit it. Later, when not governed by a specific word count, I expanded the story. Critique partners now liked it, and I waited for an opportunity to do something with it.
“Mom’s Letter” started it all.
Then came the beginning of 2011. That’s when I made the decision to self-publish. What to self-publish first? I had a history book almost done, but not quite. I still had a couple of months to go before it would be ready. But I remembered I had “Mom’s Letter” ready to go. And so I published it on Feb 13, 2011.
“Mom’s Letter” tells the story of Danny Tompkins, a 13-year-old boy who, on the last day of his first year at scout camp, learns that his mother has entered the hospital for the last time. Danny has the drive home from camp to ponder what life will be like without Mom. The story then fast forwards to the future, the Daniel, the adult Danny has become, finds a letter his mom wrote him during that week at camp, and remembers what it was like in those days.
This story took mw much further into the Danny Tompkins world that I expected to go.
That was all I figured on doing with Danny. But, as my writing continued, I realized I could make a series out of that, with the goal being to help teens who have experienced a loss to recover from the loss. And as I thought about it, the stories started rolling. “Too Old To Play” covered the wake and funeral. “Kicking Stones” was about going back to school. “Saturday Haircuts, Tuesday Funeral” told the story of how his dad dealt with his grief and that of his children. “What Kept Her Alive” told the story of his mother’s illness and suffering. And “Growing Up Too Fast” covered the struggles Danny had navigating his teen years.
The specific circumstances of Danny’s life meant he missed a lot of the typical stuff a teenager goes through.
As I say, I thought that the series was done at that point. I figured I had covered about all the things that a teen had to deal with. I hoped also that the memories of the adult Daniel showing how he got through the times would help a teen is similar situations. What more would I have to talk about?
If you read my last post, you know how “To Laugh Again” covered the return to normal after the period of mourning. That story came to me quite a while after I completed the rest of stories.
So, that’s where the series is. You can get an idea of it at this link. I hope some of you will take a look at it.
