A Quick Read

Sept 23 to Oct 7 2012, a quick read…

The last couple of weeks have been interesting, as the insurance company has made some errors. Darcy being the banker looks after all the financial stuff. It seems that on one of the invoices it said I was in an acute care hospital.  According to the policy insurance pays $15 a day for an acute care room and 80% for a rehab hospital to a maximum and we pay the rest. They called at 20 after 7 on Tuesday night to tell Darcy they would be investigating my case and would be going back to Dec 16^th to look at the file and had sent Parkwood a cheque for $15 a day, $435 for the month of February. Needless to say this upset Darcy.Darcy tried to explain that I had been in a rehab hospital. They wanted to know if I was in rehab .for drug abuse. It finally got straightened out a couple of days later but Darcy didn’t need to be put through that wringer. Good thing Darcy keeps all receipts and makes notes on everything. Seems the insurance companies just keep hammering on you hoping you give up…Darcy didn’t.

OT and PT have been going about the same. OT working on my left arm and shoulder. In PT we have been working on sit to stand, prone lying and practicing on the treadmill. It was a little discouraging last Wednesday as they were moving my legs with 40% .of my body weight on my feet. I wasn’t help lift my legs or moving them forward. To walk you need to shift weight from one foot to the other and start your hip moving up and forward to get the leg to follow. Since I haven’t used the walking muscles for a year, I can’t get the hip up to move the leg forward. I haven’t found an exercise that will strengthen those hip muscles. It’s a bit of a catch 22; don’t have the muscle to lift the hip so I can’t lift the hip to build the muscle….. hmmmmm! I must think of the movement and try to get the ol’ brain to turn on the right muscle which is hard to do as the brain turns on the ones all around it, like my quads and gluts.

Yonna is still taking me to the pool most Tuesdays and Thursdays. We are doing the same stretching, standing, weight shifting as usual. The weather is cooling down and that creates some problems riding home in the power chair after the pool in a wet bathing suit. My thermostat is broken. It is one of the autonomic systems that dilate blood vessels to warm up cold parts of the body. My feet are like ice cubes most of the time, and sometimes one is hot and one is cold. Or one hand is hot, or my legs will be warm and there will be a cold spots on them. By the time I get home in the chair on a cold day it’s pretty much… buuurrrrr… all the way home. Yonna has a jeep Liberty with heated seats and I did managed to get into the front seat by standing with Yonna and Grandpa’s help and turning and sitting on the seat. Getting out was even easier. The ride was a lot warmer. Don’t know if I can stand and pivot to get into the Matrix as the seat is quite a bit lower and I’d probably collapse into it….we shall try one day.

Did some visiting on Sunday Sep 30^th. Visited my friend Jack who I met at Parkwood, and his wife, they live just outside of Wallacetown. He lives on a beautiful 26 acre parcel of land. He broke his back when a quad flipped over on him; he’d driven up the hill a thousand times same as me having ridden thousands of kilometers in the dark. He can walk with a walker or two canes but just can’t get his legs to move on their own. He drives his car and his tractor and does all sorts of stuff around the house. It just takes him a little longer to do. Jack is proof that the only limits are those that other people put on you.

Felt a little crappy for a couple of days, nothing major just a little intestinal thing, perhaps I ate some meat from XL foods...lol. More on that later.

To walk I must shift weight to my left leg but it is very weak and it won’t support my weight. Probably said this 100 times. To get it stronger I need to get some sort of leg press to strengthen the legs. Any ideas out there on a how to construct a leg press, that I could push from a wheelchair?  To try to build the leg up I put more tensionon the bike. I think the right leg is doing a lot of the work. And I don’t know how to isolate the left leg. PT continues to work on it and whenever we are in the pool we do squats on single legs as the buoyancy helps…it is just so damn slow.

Had coffee with the boys and Etienne (broke his neck on the trail about 150 yards from where I fell) who was looking very good. He is walking better and is back riding his bike. He has his road bike on a trainer and uses his narrow bike seat. Since he has no bum either, that is probably limiting his bike riding time.

Starting to use a big exercise ball to stretch my hip extensors and my back. Lie on the bed with my legs on top of the ball and roll the ball side to side. Like any stretching it feels soooo good when it is over.

I use a CPAP machine because of my sleep apnea. It helps me get a good 7 hours sleep a night. For those of you who don’t know about CPAPs, the mask can either just cover your nose or as in my case, since I can’t keep my big mouth shut, it also covers my mouth. The bridge of my nose is also a strange shape due to about 11 breaks while playing rugby and 3 from Karate…broken noses hmmm…wonder if that has to do with its size. The number of breaks is directly proportional to the length of the nose. I digress…do to the fact that there is very little bridge left on my nose and there is also a bend, the mask does not seal well at that point. A CPAP puts pressure in your nose to keep the airways open in the back of the throat and thus a tight seal is required. To get a seal we tighten the mask, which isn’t supposed to happen and every morning I wake up with a pressure sore on my nose. It is just a matter of time before it becomes an open sore. We need to find a mask that will fit a quirky nose. Note anyone out there who snores a lot should be checked out for sleep apnea, as the airways close off during snoring. You may stop breathing and you wake up, if you don’t wake up it may interrupt your sleep unbeknownst to you. It can cause all sorts of health issues…just saying… if you snore and still feel tired in the morning…you may wanna see your doc.

How do I feel?

As mentioned, had a couple of bought's of diarrhea that are very different. It seems with a spinal cord injury it affects you differently, no you still have runny poop but I get muscle tension in my trunk and in my legs. The isometric tension is so strong in my back and intercostal rib muscles,I have to take pain meds to get through it. Probably was the intestinal thing that made me feel a little down. Perhapsthe reason the legs weren’t working in PT. I didn’t last long. When I was feeling a little glum, I saw Jack and all the stuff he is doing and then saw Etienne and how well he is getting around, it gave me some incentive to get my ass in gear again.

The good news is I have reduced the sleeping meds from 15 mg/night down to 3.75 mg with no side effects and I still get to sleep. The CPAP could be helping with that. In the morning when I get on the computer, I fall asleep on and off until about noon. We thought it might be a hangover from the sleeping meds. Now that it is down to 3.75 mg and I am still falling asleep.It must be something else…go figure. I take 150 mg of Effexor in the morning plus 90 mg of Baclofin which both have drowsiness as a side effect. Effexor is an antidepressant and Baclofin is for muscle spasms. We called the psychiatrist to see if we could move the Effexor to be taken at bedtime. Perhaps that will assist me in going to sleep and I can get off all the sleeping meds altogether.

It did the ol’ heart good seeing the reports and watching the videos of the guys and gals competing at the WKC World Championships (Karate) in Quebec on the weekend. Congrats to Kelly Havorka for her 3^rd Place in continuous sparring and to the World Champion Sensei Mark Deleemans in continuous fighting. Congrats to all who competed, Mike, Dave, Andy and Greg, you did the club proud. It should be noted that all the divisions were Black Belts and under belts could compete if they qualified. Kelly is a Blue Belt and was an alternate and didn’t know until she arrived that she would be fighting. All the more amazing her 3^rd place finish is against Black Belts.…well done.

Thanks for listening….