On Recovering

I had outpatient surgery today to (hopefully) fix tendon inflammation that I've been battling for almost a year. Don't know what started it but we have an interesting (and bizarre) hypothesis that the doctors actually find plausible, which I might blog about in the future sometime. Things went well except for trying to get up our front stoop on crutches for the first time. For about a half second my weight was on the ankle. Not good.

The pain after the surgery has been exquisite, as I had a couple of hours between when the anesthesia wore off and actually downing the pills that the doctor prescribed. Oxycodone, the "safe" kind of hillbilly heroin (because it has acetaminophen in the mix, which apparently makes it hard to abuse due to some pharmacology I don't understand). It took a while to kick in. I should say the pain is exquisite, because it's still there, just hiding behind a thin veil. The drug is a house of cards and the pain, in the shape of the throbbing flesh under and behind my ankle, is a fat, writhing slug inside it, threatening to bring the house down. Sleep turned out to be the glue that keeps the house up at all. But it's still fragile. Sand castle would be another good metaphor for it.

I like to go to sleep to a story (usually unabridged CDs of Tolkien which take years to get through as bedtime stories a few nights a week). I found online the complete text to Gibson's "Burning Chrome". the quinitessential cyberpunk hacker story, and had my laptop read it to me in one of its synthetic voices. Good stuff.

And Mrs. Slig is an angel, by the way.