Back on the bike

I had my final meeting with Dr. Brand today and he said I could get back on my bike.

I feel pretty good. Sometimes my ass is sore, but increasingly I've been going through the day without thinking about it. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop, fearing that I will open another pore and have this problem all over again. Dr. Brand was very reassuring, and that helped. I'm very excited to start exercising again.

So yeah, that's pretty much it. Moral of the story: if you have this condition or know someone that does, tell them to go to Dr. Brand or someone else who specializes in the cleft lift procedure. Really - don't put yourself or anyone you love through another surgery before trying this one. It's been 7 weeks of a pretty mellow recovery process and I feel ready for action. I'm sure I'll have moments of panic when my ass hurts or I feel twinges back there, but I feel confident.

Very grateful,

Jon

I think I'll keep it, thanks

Second to last visit with Dr. Brand today. Only waited 30 minutes this time.

He said the wound looked "spectacular" and that he was very pleased with my progress. I no longer have to wear gauze in my ass, but I think I'll keep wrapping my hips in ace bandage - it helps me fit in my pants better. I'm still easily tired, but I'm very glad to hear Dr. Brand so positive.

It was very hard to be at Lesley and Sean's wedding and not dance, but it was a lovely, lovely ceremony.

As happens all the time at the pilonidal.org message boards, I'll be posting even less frequently as I go on. I have an appointment with Dr. Brand in a month when he will hopefully give me a clean bill of health. Until then, I will try to stay healthy and spend less time worried about my ass.

Sorry but it's not much

Really, there's not much to report.

I feel fine, I move around, then I feel really, really tired. I'm having trouble distinguishing between needing to rest and space out to heal my wound and being lazy. They're not mutually exclusive, but I'm definitely a give an inch take a mile kind of guy and if I'm not uptight with myself about timing and responsibility I can go very slack very fast. I am slooooowly picking up schoolwork, but I'm still unable to sit in a chair for very long, so I'm allowing that to be the reason I'm not doing a lot of reading and typing for my conference paper that's due in two weeks (yikes!).

But I'm finally able to get around more, which means making dinner for my wife and doing the dishes when she makes me dinner. That feels good. I could also have my first sip of alcohol in two weeks and I had a tumbler of Jack Daniels, which tasted like paint. What the! Do I have to re-acclimate myself to hard alcohol? I hope not. If so, I may just have to go to some really good stuff, get some Knob Creek or Sazerac and work my way backwards instead of gritting through the lower range stuff. Wine tastes fine. Of course I'm being sparing with the alcohol: it thins the blood, which doesn't help healing any, and well, I can't imagine it does much for the body's recuperative powers at all.

A mixed blessing arrived two days ago: the Planet Earth series started rolling in from Netflix. As with all their really desirable movies, you have to wait many, many weeks to get this, and I had hoped to have them during my convalescence. Alas. But the good news is that now I can be sure to watch them with my wife, which is a lot more fun. And the better news is, these things are unbe-friggin-lievable. We've been absolutely filled with awe, real awe, at the staggering power and beauty of this planet. We can't recommend these things highly enough.

We're off to a dear friend's wedding this weekend. I'm usually a dancing fool, but I've been given strict orders prohibiting me from doing so. That'll be really rough, especially since this friend totally got down with us at our wedding. She'll understand, I'm sure, but it's not going to be easy for me to watch my friends boogeying while I can't move. I'm looking forward to getting out of Chicago, but I'm nervous about the effect of the travel on me. Two and half hours in the car won't feel so hot for my ass is what I'm thinking. I hope it's okay, since once we come back, I will be thrust into school whether I like it or not: lots of meetings to kick off the year and then classes start the following week.

And so yeah: rent Planet Earth by the BBC.

A skipped post

Yesterday I ran some errands and wound up far more pooped than expected and so I didn't write a post. I also did some work and tried to end an argument my father's been trying to provoke me into having with him. And I learned that a dear friend of mine from college is very pregnant and has breast cancer.

Sure makes my chapped ass seem inconsequential.

My recovery is going well, though. I was taken by surprise at how tired driving to school and back made me, but the wound itself seems to be doing well. I guess I need to take it easier than I had hoped. Even though the wound is healing well, my body has still suffered a trauma. I've also gone from being at least moderately active to not active at all.

I still can't shower because the tube entry point hasn't scabbed over, but one more day shouldn't kill me. Still, I can't wait to take a shower.

I'm going to lie down again.

Next step

They did it again, but this time it was longer. We were scheduled to see Dr. Brand on a day when he was in surgery all day, which is no good for him or for us. We waited 2 hours and 40 minutes before we saw him. The travel Scrabble was a huge help, but as soon as the front desk woman started giving us attitude (I was asking for the third time in 2 hours what the doctor's ETA was) I began to feel pretty stir-crazy. Amazing how that works: I was actually okay with waiting for hours but when I was treated without compassion, my outlook dimmed. All told, we were in the hospital complex from 10:45 - 3:10, only 15 minutes of which were spent with Dr. Brand. Better than in most parts of the world, I'm sure, but an unpleasant experience for someone used to living in this part of it. And but so the bandages have been changed and my ass wound is doing great and my wife tells me the scar, while long, is actually very narrow and clean. I haven't gotten to see it yet, but will have her take a photo tomorrow morning when we change the bandage. Right: I have to let the hole where the tube was scab over before I can get it wet, so I can't shower yet. That was not happy news. I'm now hoping that by Wednesday I can once again step under the shower. That'll be a great feeling.

Dr. Brand seemed genuinely pleased with the progress of the wound's healing and he took me off the antibiotics. From now on, I just have some gauze stuffed in my crack with a little tape and now the ace bandage provides the primary pressure keeping the cheeks together. Have I mentioned how weird this makes pooping?

The ride home was not great, but I actually sat at my desk for an hour or so this early evening and that was a good feeling. I'm back on the pull out couch now, but I have hopes that I'll be able to start working tomorrow for more than a little bit. Earlier I actually did some work on my syllabus and my theatre company's files, and that was nice. Some amazing people have auditioned for us over the years.

So yes. Feeling very upbeat after getting out of the doctor's office and the positive assessment by Dr. Brand, who really needs to work less. When I explained to my wife that one of the drawbacks of working with a surgeon as in demand as Dr. Brand was that we had to wait to see him, she said, "Well if he's so great, why's he working like a chump?" I hadn't heard "chump" used seriously in ages and found that hilarious. Well, we both recognize he likely works this way because he loves it and is well compensated for it. We didn't succeed in getting the last follow up appointment made due to the front desk lady (don't even ask) and that makes me nervous, but hopefully in a little over a week I will be able to stop wearing the gauze and ace bandage. What I realized today, though, was that not much is going on healing wise. There's a scar and the tissue is trying to reform to the tailbone, but that's pretty much it. If we continue to take good care of me. But yeah, it was nice to realize that the only bandage I really have is some gauze back there to soak up any bleeding, and after today, that seems unlikely so long as I'm not careless. We'll see, but I feel a lot better.

What's outside blowing in

The reason Roger Federer is unstoppable, it seems to me having watched him very few times, but the last two times fight his away out of what seemed like inevitable losses against very strong opponents, the reason he's unstoppable is that he never flags. He never seems to surge, he just never really weakens. When an opponent breaks his serve or when he's down, it never seems to be because he's weak but because the opponent is playing out of his mind. That happened in the final at Wimbledon and today, and neither Rafa nor Djokovic could seal the deal because Federer wasn't weakened when he was down. His rhythm is almost inhuman. Lendl and Sampras also seemed to be almost machine-like, but they had downs and ups in their games, and Federer doesn't really seem to have that: he just moves and moves and moves on, leveling the best efforts of his opponents.

I like writing about sports as if I have the faintest idea what I'm writing about. Of course, it's apparent listening to some of the commentators today that one needn't have that faintest clue in order to be well compensated for making the inanest of inane comments during a game. I watched some football today, too, and it always blows me away how varied the quality in game calling can be. Joe Buck seems to be doing better than last year, Aiken is still weak and CBS has some winners and some losers, but there's absolutely no match for the expertise and enthusiasm of Michaels and Madden. They can make watching a boring game exciting, whereas with Buck and Aiken you just hope they don't ruin an exciting game (they did well with today's fierce matchup between the Bears and Chargers).

Anyhoo.

Today is a day I'd be out biking if it weren't for the ass surgery and it feels bad to know that all this glorious food my wife has been cooking for me will just go to my gut and I can't work it off. But with the windows open, the lovely air is blowing in and that makes the sick room much nicer. I absolutely adore cool air, particularly cool night air. The fall has some of my favorite weather by miles, most likely because I grew up in Massachusetts where the falls are crisp and colorful. A cliche, but a truth nonetheless.

Tomorrow the bandages are changed, the tube comes out, and I start a new regimen. I'm not looking forward to changing the bandages every morning, but I am looking forward to taking a real shower. I'm struggling with the false sense that once the tube comes out of the crack, I'll be able to sit and do work, but I know that's not true, I just want it to be. So I'm looking forward to tomorrow as if I'll be able to work tomorrow evening, when in fact, I'll just be bandaged differently, still unable to work and will still need to wait until Tuesday to shower. I'm guessing tomorrow will be a frustrating day also because we have an 11 o'clock appointment but we know Dr. Brand is scheduled to be in surgery all day and so we don't know how long we'll have to wait. The last time that happened, which was actually about a year ago, I waited two hours. I was reading The Brothers Karamazov and was in the middle of "Ivan's Nightmare" and thought I was going crazy with him. At least this time I'll have company and we'll come prepared with travel Scrabble. Anyway, I'm pulling the typical move of preparing to be frustrated so when we only wait an hour, it feels good, not bad. So even though tomorrow isn't likely to go how I want it to, I'm looking forward to some movement anyway.

Not quite ready for sitting

Still with the back problems. The lying about is not good for anyone, I'm sure, but I imagine it's worse the taller you are, and at 6'2" I'm getting up there. The most comfortable place to lie is my wife's massage table, but I can't do anything other than nap or hang out there.

I'm feeling like my ass shouldn't be in this much pain now. I still can't sit or lie on my back or lie propped up on my back. I feel like 3 days after the surgery I should be approaching that, but I"m probably just impatient, as usual. As a kid, I didn't want to have to learn the alphabet, I just wanted to read. I was told to take a week off from work, so I shouldn't expect to be able to sit before Wednesday I suppose. I was also told not to exercise for 6 weeks, and lord that will be hard for me. I'm not a big exercise nut, but I'm a biker and I was getting into going to the gym lately (which I'm sure had nothing to do with my imminent inability to work out). I feel a little pleased that not exercising for 6 weeks will mean something to me, but still . . . I feel feel like it'd be good for my body to get around.

Which is why my wife and I went for a walk this morning. Just around the neighborhood, but it was good to get out, even if I was limping like a pimp, or a bad impression of a dated and corrupted image of one anyway. I trust I didn't do anything untoward to my ass during that little jaunt.

Now off to Pynchon myself to sleep, hopefully.