Who Needs Heat?

My furnace is acting up again. Of course it waits until it begins to snow, right? For the last week or so it's been around 45 and sunny, furnace was fine. Now that it's below freezing and snowy it decides it doesn't want to be a heater anymore. Great time for an identity crisis.

I turn it on and it just hums. After about 30 minutes it begins to smell like gas, or I suppose I should say it begins to smell like the chemicals they put into gas so that you can smell it. So I have to turn it off. I'll call the repair guy but who knows when he'll come. Brrr.

Dzi

My grandfather has friends in all sorts of places, and one of them is apparently a Buddhist monk. This of course intrigues me because while I believe the truly devoted of any religion deserve great respect for their faith,  my grandfather has never been a terribly religious man himself and is even typically opposed to organized religion of any sort. So him having a very strictly religious friend caught me a little off guard. This Buddhist fellow, despite all of my grandfather's cynicism gave my grandfather a Dzi bead.

If you're unaware Dzi beads are somewhat of a mystical thing, said to be hugely positive in nature. Lucky I suppose you could say if you really wanted to water it down into layman's terms. Real ones are rare and hard to find, and these days greed has hiked their prices to $500+ dollars a piece. However, you aren't supposed to sell them. I guess because they're considered Dharma objects? Or something along those lines. I could go into more detail but this blog is about a stranger's kindness, not the gift itself.

Anyway, so this man gives my grandfather such a bead, then when he hears about my health troubles, he gives my grandfather another one to pass on to me. I was very humbled by this. What a truly selfless guy. I'll probably never meet him because he lives in Chicago and spends most of his time in China, but according to my grandfather I cannot give him anything in return for the gift anyway except of course gratitude -- which he has.

Just figured I would share this because many people these days are very selfish and do nothing unless it will directly benefit them somehow. But there are still good people out there, you just have to look a little harder sometimes. When you do nice things, it inspires others to do nice things, which will inspire others to do nice things... people just need more inspiration, I think.

Art

I finally got around to downloading the drivers for my scanner so I could scan my sketches. It's been a while since I've scanned anything. In fact my last art upload was just a picture taken with a cell phone. An actual scan hasn't happened since like spring 2007.

So there ya go, everything new, everything old that's newly scanned, everything.

Gnashing Insect Teeth

I was bitten by a yellow jacket last week. What are the chances? Several of us sitting on a patio, one pissed off yellow jacket, and I'm the one to get bitten. Not stung -- bitten. Kind of a lucky break, I'm very allergic so if I had gotten stung it'd have been a hundred times worse and I would have had to go to the hospital.

Not that it wasn't still bad. They have trace amounts of venom in their bite, so I did have a reaction. My whole arm felt like it was on fire for about twenty-four hours, then it remained sore for the next three days. The day after I had a horrible migraine headache. Excedrin didn't even dent the pain, and it lasted for seven hours.

I'm doing better now. I have a little bee-sized bite mark on my arm, but it's healing.

One Down...

I finished my first session of physical therapy on Friday. For range of motion I average about 7 degrees in thumb movement, and only about 27 degrees in wrist movement. This is of course extremely low.

For instance as a comparative test, I had to put several tiny pegs into several tiny holes while being timed, then remove them and put them back into their tiny container. I was able to place and remove all the pegs with my right hand in 16 seconds. It took me 42 seconds to do the same tasks with my left hand. I felt pretty handicapped. At home I had just adjusted to doing everything with my right hand or compromising and using my middle and index finger with the left hand rather than thumb and index finger. I guess since I adjusted over the last 6 weeks I didn't really notice how bad it really really was.

My therapist is worried that I didn't start soon enough and may not regain a full range of motion back, but she thinks she can at least eliminate the pain and give me some more function of the hand. I couldn't have started earlier, though, I was immobilized in a cast/brace earlier. So... yeah.

So what's on the schedule? Well, every day I have to do these little hand motion exercises 10x. Then another exercise that's more focused on just the thumb another 10x. Throughout the day, not all at once. Then on Tuesdays and Fridays I go into the hospital's physical rehab center and do those exercises plus electroshock and dry-whirlpool therapy. Which, is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

Each session is anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half, and yes, pretty boring. I'm stuck trying to idol chit chat with a stranger (though considering I'll see her so much it'll probably be less awkward in a month) while my hand gets electrocuted, or sits in a dry whirl-pool doing finger motions. She is an animal person, though, so at least we have a topic to start out with.

The Verdict

Things went pretty well at the doctor's office today. My cast was removed and the results of my MRI were revealed to me. The fracture is pretty much healed now, thankfully. After the scare of it getting worse last time, I was very concerned about it not healing at all. The ligaments are weak and inflamed, but not seriously. So there should be no permanent damage to my wrist, though it still hurts remarkably bad.

I've been put into physical therapy for 30 days, probably starting tomorrow, and on an anti-inflammatory regimen for that whole 30 days of therapy. The goal is to alleviate some of the pain through electrical shock therapy, motion therapy, and probably water therapy -- to increase circulation and heal the damaged nerves. Supposedly that is the cause of my lingering pain. I'm optimistic.

At the moment I can't even move my thumb, at all, and it is a little purple in the nail bed. I'm going to get so owned in Soul Caliber 4 by the time I can finally play it. All of my friends will have had weeks of practice!

The Color Purple

I went to dinner yesterday after my MRI and had some chocolate mousse for dessert. I was so full from the actual meal and margarita I had that I didn't think I'd be able to finish the mousse. So the flirty waiter tries to guilt me into eating it all. He's like, "But... I made this dessert especially for you! I'll be here until 1am, so you've got plenty of time to finish it up." All I can think is... lol.

He goes to get our check and I hurry up and scoop my mousse into one of our boxes to take home with me. When he comes back he thinks I ate all the dessert and is like, "Ha! Hive five!" So I high five him, then he runs off and returns moments later with a bright purple balloon tied to a pink ribbon, "It matches your shirt!" he exclaims as he hands it to me.

I'm laughing pretty hard by now, not only because of the situation but because he got me a purple balloon to match my shirt, but what he was actually looking at was my bra... my shirt was black, the bra was purple. I couldn't bring myself to correct him though. It seemed like that would probably embarrass him quite a bit. So we just said our goodbyes, made a hasty exit, and laughed about it in the car.