SileX blogja

I'll Draw YOU!

Yes! It's the 18th of Inktober, and my 18th drawing. The 30th one, second to last, could be you! To become my 30th of Inktober subject, respond with a comment below and attach a photo of yourself. No nudes, no headless pics, and remember: a picture is either good or resembles you. :) (I guess I'll choose one at random, unless someone really catches my eye!)

Now for something completely different... I decided to do the Inktober challenge this year, the point of which is to draw something every day for an entire month. Wish me luck! Here's my output for the 1st of Inktober:

Something completely offtopic: this is a POV video of me cycling through Budapest in the evening.

Previous installments:

• The Knee Situation
• The Knee Situation, Vol 2
• The Knee Situation, Vol 3

Yes, this is the FOURTH installment of my saga on The Knee Situation. I'm not planning to overtake George R. R. Martin, and if you are tired of reading it, well, just consider how tired I am with living with it.

I'll be brief. There's a piece of advice for dealing with chronic pain at the end of this post, you can scroll past the rest.

Things I can do:

• Walk without pain. This so awesome, yet the only way one can come to appreciate it fully is to live without it for a year and a half.
• Extend and bend the knee almost completely.
• Negotiate stairs with some discomfort.
• Cycle.
• Live a relatively normal life again.

Things that I'm still working on with my therapist:

• Running.
• Putting weight on the knee in a bent state.
• Full on competitive wrestling.

So my therapist and I have worked out a rhythm. I meet her, she gives me a series of exercises that put me at about 3-4 on the pain scale. Then I do those exercises at home every day for a month, going down to 2-3 in the process, and then we meet again for a new set of stuff.

When am I going to be fully functional again? That is hard to tell. Months. Unless something drastic happens, I won't be writing about the knee again, I'll just delete the part in my profile about The Knee Situation when it's over.

That is all.

Oh wait, right, about chronic pain. It's a bitch. Nothing prepares you for living with it. It changes you, and not for the better, because a part of your existence is always busy dealing with it. There are days when it absorbs you and you cannot deal with anything or anyone else, because it just wears you so thin, and that is when you take it out on the ones around you, the ones that support you. That is the sad, sad part. The only advice I can give, the thing I learned about myself is, be aware of it. Because maybe that helps.

Previous installments:

• The Knee Situation
• The Knee Situation, Vol 2

I was holding off on writing an update on the Knee Situation for some time now, largely because I had nothing good to write, and whining does not become a Fighter.

After some agonizingly slow improvement, finally in September my knee took a turn for the worse. Suddenly things I had fought hard to regain through physical therapy were gone again. Including basics, like walking five blocks without pain.

It was harrowing, because one can live with a constant struggle as long as there is an end in sight, no matter how distant. I panicked, went to see the surgeon again. Two consults, an X-ray and an MRI later, I had my diagnosis: my thigh muscle, which has atrophied horrifically after the second surgery and following inactivity, was growing back in an asymmetric manner. Turns out, the thigh muscle is built of fours strands that join at the knee. The inner strand is the fastest to atrophy and it is also the slowest to grow. So after all that happened, my kneecap was not in its proper place, being pulled aside by this lopsidedness.

There was nothing to do about it, just have to struggle through.

One piece of good news was that the graft (the piece of hamstring the extracted to replace the broken tendon) was healthy. Presented with no other choice, I continued with physical therapy.

In the past year I had a grand total of three matches. I can't put enough quotes around the word matches so I won't try. They were like faint reminders of all the fun I used to have. Not any fault of the people involved, they were all extremely nice and tried very hard to not hurt my knee. But my range of motion was severely limited and I spend maybe 90% of my capacity trying to make sure I didn't wrench something.

Finally two days ago I had a meet with Pinstride. It seems that all the time I spent on physio has finally payed off: I could roll without hurting myself, and I actually for real had a great time. He was of course a perfect gentleman and was taking care of me, but there were times when I could forget about everything and just wrestle.

I can't thank him enough.

I'm still somewhat crippled, unable to run and some basic exercises are completely beyond my reach still. But I hope to extend my reach and complete my recovery in 2018. Onward!