Reducing My Vicodin, Expanding My Horizons

I'm a bit more mobile now, so I've ventured beyond the living room. I actually walked (crutched?) a block to a little restaurant/coffee shop and got my own lunch for once. And last night Anne drove me to a bookstore where I walked around for maybe a half hour and bought some books. Quite the adventures. I may go in to work tomorrow!

This is good, because I am cutting back on my Vicodin as the pain wears off. All in all, this is a good thing, but it also means I'm awake and lucid more often. And that means I am starting to feel very very antsy and bored.

Spam email from my past life...

So this morning I woke up, as usual, because my drugs were starting to wear off. I very carefully pulled the covers off and gingerly lowered my legs over the edge of the bed so I could sit up. Making no quick motions, I leaned over to pull on my shorts. I have to lean in a strange, unnatural way to avoid bending my hip too much. Next was to pick up crutches, and use them to help me stand up slowly, in a way such that all my weight was on my right leg.

As I made my way slowly out of the bedroom, I used the crutches to keep no more than 10% of my weight from coming down on my left side. Moving this way is kind of glacial, but it's better than last week when I had to keep all weight off of it. That was awkward and jarring with each step, and took a lot of energy. The doctor yesterday told me I could start putting a little weight on the bum leg, and it's made life a lot easier.

In this fashion I slowly made it to the bathroom, took more Vicodin, and then to the kitchen. It's a bit awkward to carry things, but I managed to get a cold pack, some trail mix and a soda in my pockets; with just the baggie of trail mix to hang onto in one hand. That hand still controlled a crutch, but the baggie edge fit in there between the crutch handle and my fingers, so it was pretty secure. I was then ready to start out to my final destination: the recliner.

Taking tentative steps, I finally managed to finish this arduous journey; the total length of which, from bed to recliner, was perhaps 25 steps. It had taken me about 35 minutes to move about 35 feet. I was pleasantly pleased that this trek had made me only moderately tired. Because I can put 10% of my weight on the left hip, my crutching gait is much easier. Yesterday morning I reached the recliner totally exhausted. Now I'm just a bit tired.

Shooing a cat out of the seat, I set my things on the table, cautiously lowered my butt into the recliner, lay my crutches down within easy reach, put the cold pack on my hip, and picked up my laptop. There, at the top of my email list, was the most ironic message it would have been possible for me to receive at that moment:

"Subject: ****Registration for the 2010 Bank of America Chicago Marathon Opens February 1"

Video Gaming in the Low Sierra

I've found my Xbox to be pretty damn useful in keeping my sanity. It's not just an activity you can do with little brainpower, it's also a good social venue. I get to say hi to friends and interact with them without having to leave my convalescent abode.

There's also a nice thing to the physical separation. When I'm talking face to face with folks, they all know I have a bum hip and am in a sad state. Online, nobody cares. I can kick somebody's butt in Halo 3, even though physically I am a useless lump. Well, theoretically, at least. Mostly I get my butt kicked. But still...nobody feels sorry for me.

Journey to the Center of the Entertainment

Or, How I Cancelled My Cable And Got Way More TV Shows


Knowing I would be stuck in the living room for a long time, I set about to work on the key piece of survival equipment: the entertainment center. It was in desperate need of updating, for sure. I had a TV that was purchased in about 1997. It was so old that it only had one input: a coax cable connector. So everything I wanted to see on my TV (DVD, video game, cable) had to run through an old VCR that had coax output. Since TV watching was suddenly going to become a much bigger part of my life, it was time to update my living room electronics.

I had basically skipped over several technology revolutions in TV watching. I had never had a Tivo, Blu Ray, a flat panel TV, or any flavor of HDTV. While that may be kind of sad from a techno-lust point of view, it was great now, because it meant I would gain a gigantic leap in entertainment performance for a relatively small sum of money.

Because I was always either working late, climbing, biking or whatnot, I never watched TV during normal viewing hours. I had gotten used to watching TV shows on dvd or downloading and watching them on my computer; usually watching whole seasons that way in few days when it was rainy or I was sick. Since I'm way too impatient to wait a week to see what happens on the next episode, this was great.

Then I got an iPhone, and started using iTunes to download TV shows to watch while flying. Then my Xbox got Netflix online. All the stuff I wanted to watch was becoming rapidly available online. Then one day my brother, a much more serious movie and TV connoisseur, told me he had ditched his cable. He had netflix, and Hulu, and iTunes. He just didn't watch it much anymore. I didn't, either.

And then I read this article in the NY Times.

And then I found out I needed hip surgery, with the associated long recovery time on the couch.

It pretty much all came together. I needed better TV. I could ditch cable and just watch stuff on the internet, with a computer hooked up to my TV. The economics worked out great, too: I was paying $145 per month for cable plus internet. If I just had internet, I could save about $100 per month. In one year, that's $1200 to spend on the gear to build a nicer entertainment center. Integrate over two years, and it's $2400. Integrate over my life and...okay, best not to get carried away.

My expedition partner, Anne, was totally on board with this. But careful research was in order. We had a lot of different formats of entertainment purchased already, and our system had to play them all. We also wanted to be able to control it all a remote, while sitting on the couch. This was a little tricky. If you're using a mouse and keyboard, you can switch from Windows Media Center to iTunes, or activate Boxee or Hulu Desktop or whatever. The people in the NY Times article had given up and bought a fancy remote mouse to control everything. But I was having none of that.

So, what obviously would be best was one program that worked with a remote and could launch everything. Mac? PC? Linux? One of the many entertainment boxes suddenly appearing at Frys? Every option I looked at had problems. One of the biggest sticking points was iTunes. Apple's damn proprietary format would rarely play anywhere else but on iTunes. One of the best ever media center programs, XBMC, used to handle it, but couldn't anymore. This bummed me out, big time, because I had seen XBMC in action on a friend's TV and loved it. It handled everything but iTunes now. Ooh. So close!

And then, Anne's father showed her the thing he had. It was an application called "Plex," it worked on the Mac, and it could seemingly do it all. It could even launch FrontRow, so you could navigate your iTunes videos, and then pop back to watch other formats, and Hulu, and Boxee, all with a remote. Once I tried it out, it all made sense: Plex is XBMC. It's a version ported to the Mac, using the same Python code background, skins, etc.



Plus, it has ready-made apps to watch all the major cable news shows, comedy central, NBC, Hulu, Netflix, Boxee, NPR, PBS, BBC, and God only knows what else. You can control it with an Apple Remote (which is pretty stylish), the Harmony remote, or (and this immediately charmed Anne) via an app on your iPhone.

So now I have a little Mac Mini hooked up to a nice new TV. We ditched our cable, and discovered that Comcast will actually pay you $12 per month to keep the lower 32 channels. That's right; it's $12 more expensive to have only internet.

In the last week we've watched the latest episodes of Big Love, a couple of seasons of Dexter, Mythbusters, Top Gear, and, thanks to Netflix online, all kinds of movies and old TV shows. I've got the current season of House queued up and ready to go as soon as I finish this post.

None of it via our local cable company.

TV as we know it is going away soon. Companies are going to freak out and maybe go out of business. But me? I used to never watch TV. This new, on-demand, a la carte way of watching just what I want is perfect for me. The old joke about "a thousand channels and nothing's on" simply isn't true for me anymore.

Into the Mild

When I first began planning this expedition, I would say things like "I wish I could just sleep through the whole week and wake up with my hip healed." Unconsciousness would make this all easy. All of my preparations were based upon the idea that surviving being awake would be the biggest challenge. Boredom, pain, and frustration were the enemies, and I was figuring out how to deal with them.

Well it turns out I might have been too worried. Two days ago I learned that it was too soon to lower my Vicodin dose, so I boosted it back up. It is no coincidence that my blog output yesterday fell off to almost zero. I have been largely unconscious since then!

I had a visit from my friend Jen, and managed to be awake for all of that, but after she left I took pills, and since then I have basically woken up every four hours just in time to take more pills and fall back to sleep.

It's pretty great.

A friendly tip

For those who come to visit me in the next few days: do not get between me and my Vicodin pills. Especially in the morning.

I will cut you.

Calfhugger!

As I alluded to earlier, engaging in this level of hard-core sedentary activity is not for the weak of heart. It takes dedication, willpower, single-minded training, careful nutrition, and, of course, the proper equipment.

In addition to my rigorous workout routine, I also am wearing the latest in high-tech exercise clothing, designed specifically for not exercising.

At all.

Ever.

I'm speaking, of course, of my fashionable compression socks. Here's a picture of Dizzy giving her review of these sylish accessories:


Because I am moving around so little, I am at risk of developing blood clots, which could then dislodge and become pulmonary embolisms. This is no laughing matter; Anne is dealing with multiple pulmonary embolisms right now. They first appeared in mid-December, and wound up sending her to the emergency room several times, including a multi-night stay from Christmas Eve through the day after Christmas. She's still having a hard time breathing well enough to do simple things like go shopping. So we'd like to avoid any more pulmonary embolisms in this house!

So they set me up with these compression socks, which are basically just super tight elastic socks. These, combined with the toe-wiggling exercises, will supposedly keep clots from forming. I'm supposed to wear them pretty much 24 hours a day. They have little ventilation holes in the top to keep my feet from smelling terrible. Or at least, too terrible. I only take them off to take a shower (a whole other adventure!) and it is sheer bliss to remove those things. I could spend an hour with a Brillo pad scratching my calves afterward.

Things were going pretty well on the pain front this morning, so I tried a little experiment. I reduced my Vicodin intake. That's probably why I was able to produce so many brilliant, high-quality blog posts today. However, that experiment is not working out. Evidently I need to keep the pain meds flowing freely a bit longer, so a while ago I took a larger dose to get back on track.

It should be kicking in soon, letting me hurt less and hopefully still rite gud. I think I can still say smart stuff about living rooms and pretty pretty kittie catties. And hips.

pffff hehehe. hips.

The Right Stuffing

Nutrition cannot be overlooked on any adventure. This is true no matter what the nature of the challenge is. The wrong food can cause difficulty or even failure. It took me a while to learn that about climbing; many easy 5.7 climbs became epic challenges because I hadn't had anything decent to eat in hours. And in every triathlon training manual I've ever seen, there are whole chapters devoted to nutrition and diet.

And so it is with the living room expedition. Not enough food, and I won't heal well, of course. But frankly, in the harsh environment of the living room, the opposite problem is much more likely. As my leg problems have developed over the last year, I've been exercising less and less, and as a result gained a fair amount of weight already. But now the equation of calories in versus calories burned has become totally unbalanced. As in, one side of the equation is rapidly approaching zero.

As of right now, I am basically sitting in a chair all day. My big exercise is hiking the twenty feet from the LZB to the bathroom a few times per day. And I have crutches to help with that.

Actually, that's not totally true. My doctor gave me physical therapy exercises to do. They're pretty grueling. They're called "foot presses." Sitting in my chair with my feet up on the recliner, I point my toes away from me, then pull them back towards me. Repeat several times. Feel the burn! They are really just to help prevent clots in my legs from my immobility. That's right, I've reached a place that is so sedentary, I need to take special precautions. Oy.

So, given this situation, proper nutrition becomes very important. I could pretty easily wind up even heavier than I am. This isn't just an aesthetic concern...I need to keep my weight down to reduce the stress on my hip. This is really my biggest challenge. Left to my own devices, I would probably just have made a stack of trail mix, microwave burritos and soda next to my chair and lived off of that for a week.

Fortunately for me, I have a lot of help in this department from my girlfriend, Anne. Although Anne's day job is being a scientist, that's just her secret identity. The rest of the world knows her as Super Cook. No, really. If you don't believe me, check out her blog, Beyond Ramen. She is also a talented photographer, and this combination has led to her being featured several times at the Internet Food Association's Daily Food Porn page.

Now, at first glance, this might seem to be bad. Really bad. Because Anne does love to bake lots of yummy desert-type things and loves even more to feed them to me. Her reaction to any situation, including a change in the relative humidity, is to bake something fantastic. And believe me, saying no to her muffins is very hard to do! So the danger of waistline expansion in this house is very real.

But Anne is also a former college varsity athlete and current triathlete with two half-ironman races under her belt, so she understands about training and nutrition, too. She therefore has been cooking delicious but non-fattening things for me. This morning she made me an egg white omelet with chicken apple sausage. So good! On top of that, she is making sure I don't spend my time just constantly snacking.

Anne has some help, as well. Her parents are also quite into cooking, and have brought by several very nice meals.

I really am getting spoiled here.

Four Against Chickadees

Fighting boredom is one of the biggest challenges when camping in the living room. TV and video games are nice, and the internet is indispensable, of course. But for sheer entertainment value, you really can't beat cats. I love dogs, too, but I think that for my current predicament, cats are a better fit, since they don't require as much attention or mobility on my part.

If you don't have cats, you may have never experienced the cat "chatter." It's pretty wacky the first time you hear it, because it's not a sound you typically expect. They do this chatter when they see some prey, usually a bird, that they can't get to. Here's a pretty good example of it:




Well, we have four cats. They like to sit on the back of the (tasteful!) couch next to the window and watch the world go by. And when there are birds, they chatter. All four of them can get going at once. They crouch in rapt attention, totally focused on some little bird on a wire outside, their mouths chattering, whiskers twitching and the tips of their tales thrashing. The frequency and intensity of the chatter goes up depending on the number of birds flitting around.

So it's pretty much a geiger counter that detects birds instead of ionizing radiation.

We also get squirrels coming by to get the birdseed we leave out. They run back and forth on the window sill right by the couch. The cats don't chatter at the squirrels. They just freak right out. They have no idea what to do with these brazen little invaders, only millimeters away, on the other side of glass...sometimes only on the other side of a thin wire mesh!


The daily drama of cats vs. birds vs. squirrels definitely keeps me occupied. Now if I could just keep them from jumping on my hip out of nowhere.

Couching the Void

A living room expedition, like any other project, should not be undertaken without clear goals in mind. Sure, you could just decide to hang out in the living room without thinking about what you're going to accomplish there. Some people might even argue that this "relaxation" approach is best; that the living room is a place where the pressure to perform should be removed, and the soul allowed time to recuperate from stress and come to peace with the environment. Those people are losers.

No, you've only got one go-round on this world, so you'd better make the most out of it, and that means you can't dawdle around wasting time. Now that doesn't mean you can't relax. Far from it. Rest and recuperation are important. But precisely because they are important, they can't be left to chance. If I'm going to rest, then I'm going to do it right.

So, what are the goals of this living room expedition? In my case, there's one obvious overriding goal: make my hip better. "Relaxing" is all very nice, but unless it's going to help my hip get better, it isn't going to fly. For instance, I find taking bike rides relaxing, but right now that would make my hip worse. Especially because in my current Vicodin state, I would probably bike right into a tree.

Since making my hip better is the most important thing, everything else flows from that requirement. My doctor tells me that keeping weight off of it is the key thing, so I need a good place to sit that will minimize the strain I put on the hip. Fortunately, modern technology has the answer: the La-Z-Boy recliner. The LZB is perfect. It's easy to get into from a pair of crutches, supports your feet, allows you to sit up for TV watching and video game playing, but lets you lie back to take a nap without having to move at all. This is a key piece of recuperation equipment.

Unfortunately, I didn't have one. Like most guys who like to play video games and watch TV (which is to say, really, most guys), I wanted one. I had wanted one since I first laid eyes on one as a small child. But somehow my girlfriend didn't. Something about them being ugly. I didn't see how that mattered, but evidently some people take aesthetics into account when selecting furniture. I thought that perhaps she was overlooking the inner beauty of a device that was so perfectly designed to bring joy and comfort to the modern human.

But sadly, we live in a cruel world that is shallow and appearance-oriented, so the poor LZB gets discriminated against just because it's a bit ungainly looking and overweight. She had put her foot firmly down, and that foot was not budging. My arguments fell upon deaf ears. So I went without, and was forced to sit on a tasteful but non-reclining Pottery Barn couch to watch TV.

Obviously, I should have thought of the "what if I develop painful arthritis and have hip surgery" argument sooner. Now it was clear an LZB was exactly what I needed. Had I known this earlier, I would have pretended to be in extreme pain whenever I stood up and sat down.

Ironically, given her opposition to the LZB, it was my girlfriend who wound up supplying one. Her friend's parents had one in a guest room, and were happy to loan it to us for a month or two. She had gone from being the LZB's biggest foe to its primary enabler. So now we have one, and it's perfect. It's soft and cushy, and leans back and forward at my every whim. It even has a seat heater and massage function! My life is now complete.

Sure, it's temporary...in theory. But I figure that once the LZB has its foot in the door, and does such a great job helping her boyfriend feel whole again, she won't be able to coldly dismiss it. How could she kick out something that brought such relief to someone close to her?

There's a lesson here. I should probably remember this kind of domestic jiu-jitsu technique in the future. I wonder what kind of ailment I would have to fake to get a coffee table that I can put drinks on without coasters?

Narcotics, the Freedom of the Pills

Left, a normal hip. Right, my hip. That part sticking out on the right? Yeah, that's got to go.

Drugs are great. Reeeeallly great. Yeeeeaaaahhh.

I'm on drugs right now, obviously. I've really never done drugs much at all in my life, which probably makes them work way better on me. Today, for instance, I'm on Vicodin, and it seems to really be doing the trick.

There was a kind of transition period between when I was in the hospital, and when I came home, and I was without pain relief, or with pretty limited pain relief, for a few hours. And let me tell you, that makes me really appreciate having the pills now.

The scary operation I had was "hip arthroscopic surgery with traction" which means they pulled my femur partway out of my hip, then cut two holes in the skin. They stuck a little fiber optic telescope through one, and a dremel tool in through the other, and shaved off the part of my femur that was getting in the way. Now, that may sound like fun, but it really wasn't.

But I don't remember any of it. The anesthetist said "so I just put about three beers into your IV," and next thing I knew I was in the recovery room. And right now, my hip should be really quite angry at me because I let strangers remove part of it, but instead it's just kind of humming along, feeling groovy.

So drugs are great, and you obviously need the right drugs for your living room adventures. Lack of drugs could rapidly lead to expedition failure. On the other hand, too much drugs can also lead to expedition failure. For example, it took me two hours to write this post because I took my Vicodin in the middle of it, and that meant I took about an hour and a half nap.

Hopefully my blog posts will become a little more lucid as I wean myself off of the drugs.

Why I Went to the Living Room

I went to the living room because I had been living deliberately, I had lived deep and sucked out all the marrow of life, and I had come to Discover that I had screwed up my hip.

Yes, after a life of climbing, hiking, skiing, snowboarding, running, biking and swimming, I had well and truly borked my left hip. At the advanced age of 40, I had been diagnosed with arthritis. Wow. I had lived well and my body was paying the price.

In fairness, I guess it isn't totally because of the abuse I put my body through. The first words out of my doctor's mouth after seeing my X-ray was "you're a German Shepherd!" You see, I have hip dysplasia. Although I never knew it, I have had it all my life, and it eventually led to arthritis. Of course, all the running probably didn't help.

Eventually it was decided I would have frightening surgery on my hip to make things better. And that meant I would be immobile for a while. As my hip healed, there would be no running or hiking or skiing or, well, walking. I was, therefore, going to have to spend a lot of time sitting in my living room. Probably weeks, if not months.

This made me nervous. Of course, I had sat in my living room before, but never for such an extended period of time. How would I survive? What would I do all day? I needed to prepare. I needed to research the living room environment. The difficulties would have to be identified. Equipment would have to be bought. Skills would have to be learned; a plan of attack developed. It struck me that I was preparing for this living room experience in much the same way I would plan a climbing trip, or prepare for a triathlon. I realized I was mounting an expedition to my living room.

When I was a kid, one of the things I was assigned to read in my English class was Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Wood. I had always admired Thoreau. Not because of his deep pastoralist philosophy or his vocal opposition to slavery; although those things were nice. No, I admired how he had managed to make navel-gazing pay off for himself. He was totally broke and had to live in a little shack his friends donated to him in exchange for doing odd jobs, and he turned the experience into a paying book deal.

So I figure I'll do the same thing. While I'm stuck recovering from surgery, I'm going to use this blog to record my experience of converting from an active life to a life of sitting on my butt in a recliner. Hopefully, just like Thoreau, I'll get a book deal out of it and become one of the leading forces in American philosophical thought. I don't see why not. I might even grow a sweet neck beard like Thoreau did.