On The Mend!

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

I am on the mend and sooo glad! I had another followup appointment at Duke Sports Medicine yesterday and everything is improving better than expected. I’m cleared to start physical therapy now! I’m finally completely off the heavy duty pain meds and just on the small-guy stuff and only once in the morning and once at bedtime. I finally feel like I’m becoming a normal person again.

The shoulder area still hurts some. It’s nowhere near as bad, though. It is still pretty much constant, though. And, I still have numbness in part of my left hand as well as some odd areas of weakness in my left arm. The weakness is mostly my tricep and lats. I thought my deltoid was spared (it’s the more common site of weakness for this) but a quick check in sports med yesterday shows that I indeed have some weakness there too. The muscles that flex my wrist and control my thumb motion are weak as well. It could take as much as a year to recover the feeling and the strength. Oh well, at least I’m not a musician or a gymnast or something.

In the interim, I’ve had a few days that have been almost completely tied up with some kind of electronics issues: internet problems, computer stuff, programming and activating my husband’s new iPhone (he wore me down – I manage the phone and computer budget in our home – we split the bills up in odd ways but it works for us). I am so sick of being stuck on the phone with IT people that I have turned off all phones in the house for the duration of the day today. No phone calls, no trying to hold the phone between my ear and shoulder with this messed up shoulder thingy I’ve had, no talking for me today! I’m done with people for a day or two.

I’m back to some slow running. I managed to plod through 30K on Sunday. That’s a starting point to getting back on track. I’ll try 40K this week and then 50K next week. Once I get to 50K, I stay there until I can get my pace on track. Of course, I missed all that nice weather for long runs. Darn.

On a completely different note, we had an incredible once in a lifetime experience last week. A doe gave birth right under our bedroom window in the wee hours of the morning on the 6th/7th. She left the fawn in the grass under a tree. The wildlife resource pages online said that was not uncommon and listed some checks we could do to make sure the fawn was okay. Apparently, it’s completely not true that a doe will reject it’s fawn if it smells humans on it – it will just clean off the awful smell and then move the fawn and bed it down in another place close by. We found out that we would basically have this fawn under our protection for the next 5 or 6 days until it was big and strong enough to follow its mom. Oh my. Then, our outdoor cat that adopted us a few years back tried to attack the fawn because it must have looked like a rabbit or something (it was smaller than the cat). So, Juliette bought herself a week of porch jail. She just went back outside today. The fawn seemed pretty healthy and only did the bleating for mom thing once. We, of course, freaked out and were whispering loudly, shut up, be quiet, shhhh!!!! It looked at us like, WHAT? but finally laid back down in the thick underbrush in a grove of sycamore trees in the front. We kept our distance and just did visual checks so we only got one picture on that first morning. I still miss the little thing. I keep hoping I’ll see it with its mom out on the trail. We could see the little footprints (hoof prints?) in the soft ground the morning it probably left with the doe. Happy and sad day all in one.

Happy trails,
Missy