So, I’m sure people noticed, but I haven’t been using this blog for months. Part of that was that I had some foot surgery, but that ended up being a fairly minor component.
Mainly, my father lost both his lower legs and nearly died.
It wasn’t diabetes, which is by far the leading cause of such things. For reasons that have not, in spite of a large and well qualified medical staff searching over weeks and months, been fully ascertained, my father’s platelets reached a point where he had blood clots all over the place. A large one in the aorta seems to have let go, disintegrated, clogged up his legs, and denied circulation to his lower extremities. Eventually both had to be removed, one above the knee and then later the other below the knee. After the second, he was in very serious danger from stress having bodyslammed his kidneys and so forth.
From this position, he made as big a recovery as you could hope for, and has been at home for two months.
For three months, I was ‘stranded’ with my father’s newer computer, without access to my old one and without easy access to things like cookies and passwords for certain things, and besides that, I was busy, distracted and stressed. It is only now that a great deal of the issues that were coming up – mind you, issues relating to his having survived, which was not always a certainty – like insurance paperwork, property taxes, and so forth. With help from the community and from family, it has been a little less painful, and as the insurance picture clears up, we’re getting on a long term path.
On Tuesday (6th of Nov), both my father and I were visiting our surgeons, though in wildly different locations four hours apart. He’s finally been cleared for rehab; it seems there was some miscommunication involved, but that hardly matters since he wasn’t healed up enough to do it until relatively recently anyway. He did have minor rehab for coming home (and it’s better to heal at home than not, mind you), but he’s a prosthesis candidate so that’ll be the star attraction. I hope for the best. Beyond that, it’s finally time to push his tool invention forward to the finish line… and in the midst of all this, he WILL get his patent. It’ll be on half the original claims. That’s not bad at all.
For my part, my healing process was drawn out by some tissue infection that has now been completely beaten down. The final issues are extremely small compared and the emphasis now is simply on making sure there is no backsliding. My surgeon is very happy and hey, so am I. But, I’ll still have very little time for blogging; one way or another my family needs me to do things in “real life”, so I’m approaching the day when I have my full driver’s license back after a long hiatus so that I can be my father’s proper errand boy, something he does need. At present he can’t drive; his newer, better car is a standard, a dying breed to be sure. I can drive standard, but with no lower legs, he can’t; automatics can be modified however. So, I’ll be doing a lot in the interim. Until now a cousin of mine has stepped up to be a gigantic help, but his availability is time limited by “life” and I need this and my family needs this, so that’s how it is. No complaints.
So that’s how it happened. The fact of the matter is, my legs are “better than new” due to a long-term imbalance being solved. A little conservatism won’t kill me. However, the fact is, even for the blogging and for my Facebook effort, English Idioms, I’ve plucked the low-hanging fruit already. There are many things in culture which are better explained holistically; I’ve done what I can for drive-by reading, but hey, there’s a lot I’m still appreciating freshly. There’s parts of Japanese culture and language that are inspired, and others that are just crazy, like most things in this world. It seems I am destined to live it more than talk about it for a while. Best wishes to everyone, thank you, and hey, if I actually have the time to comment on something current, I’ll make the effort. Thank you, and see you later – more “mata ne” than “sayonara”.
Although my comment doesn’t relate to this post, I just wanted to say- I’d been using Pimsleur’s Japanese lessons, and a few of the bits and pieces of grammatical Japanese weren’t explained very well, if at all (no, ga, wa, etc), but your blog posts made their function quite clear. Thank you!