I’m now just past six weeks since my heart surgery. That was the time at which all official restrictions ended. But I’m still going to take it a little easy. I don’t think I’ll be lifting anything over 20 pounds. I still won’t be running, not even for 10 paces.  In short, I hopefully know my limitations.

But Lynda and I have been walking, on sunny afternoons, finally working up to a mile on Friday and 1.2 miles yesterday. And I’ve been working out in the yard. On two days I worked on thinning my blackberry bushes, which I’m afraid I allowed to grow from rows to one big mass of bushes. I’ve finished the main thinning, though I may thin a little more. Saturday I worked on raking up the cuttings, and cutting them into smaller pieces so they will fit in the wheelbarrow. I figure two more days at least, more likely three.

My handwriting is barely any better. I did some writing on Saturday and Sunday. I was sure better than right after my last stroke, but it’s a long way from where it was. My speech is doing better. I still struggle with certain sound combinations. Don’t ask me to say “Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear,” for I can’t do it. But I’ve been able to sing the hymns at church the last few weeks. It probably helps that I can hardly hear myself over the music. Then again, I taught adult Sunday School class yesterday, and people seemed to understand me.

I’m still gimpy legged going up and down stairs, or even walking on level ground. I make it down to The Dungeon every day of late. But the ability to concentrate on new writing came slowly. Part of that is loss of keyboard control on my laptop, making it necessary to use the wireless keyboard and mouse for everything. Part of it is difficulty typing due to loss of fine motor skills in my left hand, but that might be aggravated by my torn left rotator cuff. Is it the stroke hindering my typing or the fact that it’s difficult to extend my arm to reach the keyboard?

Whichever, I had trouble typing, which resulted in my not wanting to write. I also lost three days of time due to a computer problem. But, by Friday I was ready to put my mind and hands to it and made my daily word goal—Saturday too.

So the healing is coming. Slowly, but it’s happening.

Dateline: Thursday, October 24, 2024

Last Saturday, I went to the ER due extreme difficulty breathing under even mild exertion. I had gone to the ER for the same thing on Thursday, but they sent me home. On Saturday, it was much worse. This time they re-did the test from Thursday (a chest x-ray), did a CT scan, and admitted me. In the middle of the night, they did an echo cardiogram and determined my pericardium, the sac around the heart, had filled with fluid, making it hard for the heart to beat, making it hard for me to breathe.

On Sunday, I underwent moderately invasive surgery to remove the fluid, also putting in a drain tube. They then watched me several days and measured the continued drainage. In all, they pulled 1070 cc of bloody fluid from my pericardium. That’s a fair amount.

An echo cardiogram yesterday morning showed the sac to be clear of fluid, so I was released in the afternoon after a long session with my cardiologist. I’ve been on blood thinners ever since my first stroke in January, and on stronger thinners since my stroke in September. He is concerned about the risk of continued bleeding. So I’m now off blood thinners until a repeat echo cardiogram next week shows no accumulation of new fluid. After that, I may go back on a mild blood thinner.

So what does this all mean going forward? Today I’ll spend some time looking at where my different writing projects stand, and make some plans for the next couple of weeks. One thing that will happen is I will (well, our son and his husband will) move my workstation upstairs, out of The Dungeon. Working in a new space will take some getting used to—although I’ve done that before

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.

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.”