No News is Good News?

Sorry it’s been a while since my last post, in case you missed me. The seven-week mark arrives Monday and recuperation is settling into a routine around here:

• 

  See how I got screwed?

  strength-building physical terrorism twice a week with the lovely, talented, unflappable and very funny Sabine at Truckee Physical Therapy (plug!) utilizing all kinds of interesting devices besides the good old stationary bike, like a rubber dome on which you try to balance while passing a ball from hand to hand, the “reformer” (a Pilates table that looks like there should be torches and hooded monks standing by) and different designer colors of elastic tubes, bands, and teeter-tottery platforms

• home exercise, the low-tech version of above, twice a day if I’m being good
• no more medical appliances! Gawdamighty, I’m drug-less, grabber-less, and cane-less at last!  I can even put on my own socks now, and tie my shoes! … but
  • [don’t tell anyone] I still carry a handicapped parking placard good until … 6/17/2012!!! (I will use it responsibly, I promise.)
• and finally, a follow-up visit to the surgeon’s office (that’s Paul Shonnard and his assistant Shana Fearnley) where I was told “you’re off all restrictions — go ahead and bend over” and had this x-ray taken which shows how much love my femur is making with a large piece of titanium
  • I will return once a year for x-rays and, in maybe 18-20 years (or more, fingers crossed) when the high-density polyethylene acetabular cup starts wearing out and the joint starts that metal-on-metal squeaking, it’ll be time for the innocuously labeled “revision”

Biking? Hiking? Maybe wait another six weeks. I need to work on something called “proprioception,” which means that my eye-leg coordination is still a little wacky, like when I walk down stairs there’s this subtle but definite and disorienting “whooaah” feeling, and walking upstairs, the surgical leg still feels a little like a noodle. Besides, statistically, there remains a 0.02% chance of dislocation.

But at least I’m wearing big-boy shoes again!

Out and Ab-ouch!

The sun was shining and a light snow was falling, showery follow-up to the much bigger St. Paddy’s Day storm the night before, as I drove up the Truckee River road to … you were expecting physical therapy? No way! To go dancing!

Rules of the mosh pit: move aside for the guy with the cane?

I pulled into the last remaining handicapped space in front of the Alpine Meadows lodge and, leaning on my cane (partly for effect, to justify the disabled placard on my windshield) I threaded cautiously among the crowds of tired  ski-wielding citizens stumbling through the slush in their plastic boots, mounted the wet cement staircase, tottered through the locker room (who designed this place?) and sidled into the aprés-ski lounge where thunderous dance beats pulsed from a phalanx of guitars, horns, keyboards, and percussion. It was The Nibblers! I saw my friends Jan, Kenny, and Ann, and Sean and Karen all squeezed into a mass of human flesh between the bar and the stage, but I — even I — knew I wasn’t going there. I shouted and waved my cane from the sidelines to catch their attention, but to no avail, and finally asked a passing “dude” to convey a message (his reply, filtered through an ear-slamming bass and a couple shots of Jaeger, was “WHA-A-AT?”).

“It’s usually the men,” my nursing professor cousin Lois, herself a new hippy, told me,” who dislocate new hips.” By a month or so after surgery they feel pretty good, drink a few beers, and decide it’s time to carry in the firewood, or clean out the garage, or shovel the driveway, or reposition the BarcaLounger, or — God forbid — play a few rounds of golf. Or, like happened to one local woman, reach down to unclip ski bindings and “pop!” The Big Ouch.

"Ow!"

Statistics vary on probability of dislocation, and if you look online you’ll find numbers ranging from 4%-14%, but no gender breakdown. It’s more complex than that, depending on the particular type of incision, size of ball, first-time replacement or revision, and so forth. I’ll let my surgeon Paul Y. Shonnard explain the chances for my type of appliance and procedure:

… for the first 6 weeks there is about a 0.7 percent, or 1 in 130 rate of dislocation where the hip can pop out of joint. … Hips popping out of joint are a problem because if it happens once, a lot of times it will be okay, but if it happens 2 or 3 times you are back in the operating room. The first 6 weeks is the key. The rate is 0.02 percent per year thereafter.

More often than skiing the bumps or driving a golf ball or pogo-dancing to a punk band, dislocation can be caused by something as apparently harmless as leaning over to pick up a dropped chicken wing, sinking down into a comfy chair, or even crossing one’s legs in a thoughtful, William F. Buckley Jr.-ish sort of way. Pop! Caveat emptor. I’m five weeks post-surgery tomorrow, and doing everything I can to NOT pick up litter or cross my legs, to move in a stately and measured manner, to adjust the seat and extend the leg when climbing into an automobile, and to religiously address staircases in the approved “Heaven-Up, Hell-down” mode (“heaven” = surgical leg, “hell” = non-surgical leg).

But OK, so I pushed a little snow off the deck yesterday, verrrrry carefully (no lifting) and later when I went up to Tahoe Donner Cross-Country to play a few sing-along tunes for their Friday-night Miracle March happy hour & open mike, my friend and fellow musician Bill picked me up, drove me up the hill through the storm, and packed my new Yamaha 88-key weighted-action piano between house and ski lodge. Here, taken from my safe and sane position behind the keyboard, is what remained of OUR mosh pit as we closed the place down at 7:00 PM (we’re singing “For What It’s Worth” here). Come join the fun next Friday at 4:00 PM or after the Tour de Euer on Sunday. We’re not The Nibblers, but we’ll let you call the tune and sing lead or chorus, as you prefer.

"There's something happenin' here ... singin' songs and carryin' signs ..."

Drinking & Eating: So What Else is New?

Nothing significant to report on the recovery process, just the slooowwww and steaeaeadyyy  progress one gets from plenty of rest & reading, regular exercise, a sensitive yet assertive and highly skilled physical therapist, outstanding nutrition, and a moderate dose of cheap red wine as indicated each evening.

By “cheap” I don’t mean “corrosive.” I mean, when you can get a daily drinker like Dancing Bull ’07 California Merlot for $7.99 — 750 ml of a more than decent regional wine for less than a glass costs downtown — why spend twice that on something with a fancier label? Not that we won’t patronize The Pour House and other fine local establishments at every opportunity, especially when it’s time for that $20 bottle to keep your palate in training, or a festive tasting event to benefit some worthy cause.

With wine, of course, one is well advised to take a little food. I note our menu selections from the past few days, devised by Amy in part to use up the vegetables that come to us in our shared CSA (“community-supported agriculture) box from Mountain Bounty Farm every other  Thursday:

Looking MIGHTY pleased now that she's used up all those parsnips.

• Indian Spiced Carrot Soup with Ginger
• Chicory and White Bean Soup
• Chicken & Winter Vegetable Soup
• a loaf of hearty whole-grain Volkoren bread from Erick Schat’s Bakkerÿ in Bishop
• Country Captain with Cauliflower and [oops we forgot the] Peas (an Anglo-Indian curry we made with purple and white cauliflower. You’re supposed to add peas at the last minute, but oh well, nobody seemed to notice)
• Chicken Breasts with Julienned Beets and Sauteed Beet Greens, not to mention a dollop of orange butter
• Collard greens with bacon and walnuts
• Cheese fondue in a vintage Fifties fondue pot (brought over, plugged in, and filled by Steve and Peggy)
• lots and lots of green salads, including the one JoJo and Carl contributed
• Betty Crocker molasses cookies rolled in white sugar
• a lamb shank at the Hill Street Grill
• bags o’ oranges, grapefruits, and kiwis
• 5-grain mush with dried cherries and toasted almonds (nuestro pan del día)
• Blind Dog Coffee

Many of these recipes Amy downloaded from the wonderful website epicurious.com. Check it out, especially if you love to eat and have a random selection of ingredients on hand. Where else could you enter — OK, I’m going to pick three things at random — “leeks,” “ricotta,” and “prunes,” and retrieve a four-fork recipe for Duck Confit with Potato-Leek Ragout?

The Ballad of Friends Bearing Food

Next, a praise song of sorts cataloging  the remarkable three weeks of “take-out” we have enjoyed, flavor-enhanced by the friends who mostly stayed to laugh, eat, and entertain us, as they marvelled at my newfound prowess with the martial-arts cane.

You can experience a ragged but authentic live performance here, or, for a more private literary encounter, read to your lonely self the following stanzas. Hey — why not do both? You can sing along!  Or, at least, read aloud. Just watch out for occasional “tricky” rhymes and unanticipated shifts in ballad meter. Hey, it’s folk music. Relax. As Woody sez, “If I want to scratch my nose, I play a few extra chords while I do it. If I forget the next verse, I play a few chords until I remember it. If I want to leave town, I get up and leave town.”

Come gather ‘round my blog, friends,
A tale I’ll tell you now
Of when I got a brand new hip
And people brought us chow.

When I researched the surgery
The doctors, drugs, and such.
I don’t remember reading
I could eat and drink this much.

Winona made a Doodle page
To organize the meals
People signed themselves right up
To come and help me heal.

Of lasagnas there were two big pans
We loved that cheesy goo
One pan brought by John and Diane
and the mushroom one, by Sue.

White chicken chili, with condiments
Was shared by Mary and Jeff.
Next day we ate it constantly
Till there was nothing left.

When ages past I roomed with Skip
Rellenos he would bake
He and Chris brought some for lunch
Left over from ‘78.

Just kidding, Skip, they were fresh! And good!
Sorry you guys couldn’t stay.
We ate the fruit for several meals
And rellenos for breakfast next day.

One Sunday eve the doorbell rang
It was Eric, Arden, and Vicky;
On a bed of kale with faro and garlic
Sat marinated roast chicky.

In floated a bowl of seaweed
With chunks of raw ahi —
They call it poke in Hawaii,
Thanks to Michael and Valerie.

Saturday night’s all right for eating
And drinking with your friends.
Lisa made a potluck,
This email she did send:

“Party at the Horneymores,
Bring food, and wine, don’t fail!”
So on came Jacqui, Troy, and Chuck,
Jamie, and Sherrill, and Gayle.

Footsteps down our breezeway,
At the door we heard them halt.
It was Patrick and Lynda with ice cream and cookies
And salad, with truffle salt.

Another time it was Eryn,
With Caroline and Hannah in tow,
With okra, shrimp, and sausage
A kettle of Cajun gumbo.

Let’s not forget old Timmy Pete!
Once I could walk on this hip,
He threw a party at his house,
With tequila, guitars, and tri-tip.

Buff and Val brought barley soup,
With chunks of tender beef.
And oatmeal cookies from Crunchville
For the munchies:  quick relief.

Don, he brought raviolis,
And some of Heather’s soup
And plenty of Southern comfort
Before he flew the coop.

From Lake Tahoe, California
To our kitchen from the Western Shore,
Toni and Gerald fixed us pizzas
With crust and toppings galore.

Amy’s niece Lindsay, and her husband Geoff
From their home by the Bay
Sent cheese and apples, by Federal Express
And pears ripe to eat that day.

Oh, that’s right — let’s not forget Amy
Who’s been cooking up a storm.
With Epicurious.com and our CSA box,
She keeps us full and warm.

Chicken and peanuts, turnips and kale,
Split peas with double ham,
A salad of collards and pickled apples,
For all this, thank you, ma’am!

Big shout out to Truckee’s Pour House
It’s where we buy our wine
All this food went down real well
with juicy fruit of the vine.

Well, now you’ve heard my story,
Of the meals our friends did supply.
Not to mention lots of laughter,
A drug you just can’t buy.

I hope this doesn’t stop now
I hope you bring some more
With your great delivery service
We don’t need to go to the store.

(Thanks to Woody for allowing me to borrow the tune of “Pretty Boy Floyd.” I promise to put it back when I’m done.)

To Weed or Not to Weed

The title pretty much says it all, yo. If you knew the number of friends — some of them wearing uniforms for a living — who have suggested that the solution to pain, drug-induced nausea, and ennui that comes from forced inaction, lasting now three weeks, might be found in what was once known as a “doobie,” well, you’d be surprised. I guess this is why 16 states and the District of Columbia have defied the federal government and passed medical marijuana laws. The stuff is not hard to obtain, that much I know from a New Yorker article I read a few years ago. No need to go hang out in the high-school parking lot and make friends with some slouchy kid wearing an Insane Clown Posse T-shirt.

Now, there was a time when the blood level in my THC system was running kind of low, say for a few years there back in the Seventies. But these days, in Hoyt Axton’s immortal lines,

No, no, no, no, I don’t smoke it no more

I’m tired of waking up on the floor.

No thank you, please, it only makes me sneeze,

And then it makes it hard to find the door.

 

Or not. One warm evening last year my wife Amy and I attended the 60th birthday party of an old friend, a man who keeps the Summer of Love going in his heart. Some distance away in the Yuba River country of northern California, at the end of a long winding road in the woods, we arrived at its bucolic venue: a ten-acre organic vegetable and fruit farm (no, really!) with a big outdoor stage, an open-air kitchen, a row of homebrewed kegs, and several small tables such as this one:

Help yourself!

“Oh, boy!” I blurted, beer in hand. “Sesame snacks! No, wait a minute…” Anyway, my hip was hurting me as usual after the long limp from the field where we’d parked, and right then the daughter of a friend handed me a nicely rolled and recently ignited product of this table, suggesting that it might relieve my obvious osteoarthritic discomfort. What the hey, I thought to myself, and imbibed. I don’t want to sound like Bill Clinton, but I had exactly two (2) hits. Next thing, I was collapsed white-faced and sweating in a chair, as long-suffering Amy took charge and negotiated with the old friends and tie-dyed acquaintances who chose that moment to come over and pay their respects. I’d mutter something surrealistic as their faces rotated in my field of vision and their voices echoed down a long wind tunnel, and Amy would say something pleasant that I might have come up with had I not been so wickedly baked.

 Well, they’ll stone ya when you’re walkin’ ’long the street
They’ll stone ya when you’re tryin’ to keep your seat
They’ll stone ya when you’re walkin’ on the floor
They’ll stone ya when you’re walkin’ to the door
But I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get stoned

 

My involuntary vacation in the state of catatonia lasted for about 15 minutes, to be followed by a sense of inner peace and unconditional love so profound that I had no desire for any more beer, nor for more weed, but rather for a huge platter of the vegan banquet just then being served. I grabbed a Blue Sky soda and happily went from group to group greeting friends I hadn’t seen in years, talking (“rapping,” we used to call it) about parallel universes, underwater life on Titan, machine-brain interfaces, Fermat’s Last Theorem, superstrings and so forth, and in general enjoying myself as much or more than I have at any huge party in years.

Finally, three or four hours later (though it felt like 10 or 20 minutes) it was time to leave. Saying goodbye to our host, I mentioned that the, uh, party favors were rather potent, to which he replied, “they grow it with laptops now, dude.” While pondering that particular brave new world, I carried a friend’s sleeping four-year-old a quarter-mile to the car, figured out their child seat, and being designated the driver, piloted my tired and beer-sodden friends on dark twisty two-lane roads for over an hour to get us safely home to their “pad,” as we used to say. I felt wide-awake, alert, and in full control of all motor reflexes. And that old pre-surgical hip of mine? No pain, no problem. Next morning I felt wonderful, as one would in any case, waking up outdoors with one’s loving wife in a queen bed on a flawless foothill summer morning:

The Ramseys' guest room.

So, will I not smoke it no more? Why should I bother? I have no pain to speak of, and no nausea, now that the narcotics have been flushed from my system, and plenty of books, DVDs, writing, and research to distract and stimulate me. I sleep just fine, thanks to MTTN. I do not want to wake up on the floor, or erode what little memory for random facts and song lyrics I still retain, or bring jackbooted federal agents down on my little scene, or gain a reputation for incomprehensible conversations about twelve-dimensional travel and interplanetary peanut butter.

The jury is still out. And for some reason I keep thinking about what Salvador Dali said, when asked whether his paintings of desert monsters and melting clocks were inspired by controlled substances: “I don’t do drugs, I am drugs.”

Amazing Memory Trick

"Thousand-and-one, thousand-and-two ..."

Thanks to my physical terrorist, I’ve been counting to ten a lot lately. I hate that. What am I, a kitchen timer?

So I devised a way of keeping track of my reps as I slog through the twice-daily routines that promise to limber me back up, strengthen my surgically stressed leg muscles, and restore my ability, in the words of the hospital’s hip replacement manual, to “resume the activities you love, like bowling, shuffleboard, and golf.”

Rather than zone myself out and mess with my background exercise music by silently whispering “1 – 2 – 3 …” I use mental pictures of each number. This is based on an old party trick used to memorize a list of objects out of sequence by turning the list into a series of cartoons:

• 1 = barber pole
• 2 = swan
• 3 = bare butt
• 4 = chair
• 5 = wheelchair
• 6 = golf club
• 7 = flag marking golf hole
• 8 = eight ball
• 9 = hobo’s bandana pack on stick
• 10 = baseball and bat

So, with each stretch or reach or flex or pump or whatever the motion, I run through the sequence of images which thread themselves — little or no effort needed — into an organic, mnemonic narrative. Looking out the barbershop window I see a swan in the lake scared away by a skinny dipper; I jump from my chair, fall, end up in a wheelchair on the golf course … you get the drift. Do try this at home. If you’re a boomer like I am, it’ll tone up those neurons and keep you from mindlessly wandering out into the woods someday.

Better yet, next time things get dull at a party, ask someone to list ten objects on a piece of paper and read you the list out of order. In your mind, make a cartoon of each object with its number — e.g. the swan driving the pickup truck, the toaster on the putting green — and amaze your friends by reciting the list back to them in order.

You probably think I’m still taking those percocets, don’t you?

"So the swan who got the mohawk was lining up his putt ..."