#for those who are super curious

[agirlnamedhagrid]

So this is going to be a bit rambly, but, well, what is tumblr for if not a good ramble to the void? TW: medical information in the next two paragraphs. TW: drugs/painkiller use vaguely referenced in the rest.

I had my seventh knee surgery on July 15. It’s my second this year. The first was in April to harvest a bit of my own cartilage, clean up the joint, and to remove a *surprise* plica that my body decided to grow in the worst possible place to try and stabilize my knee joint, forgetting (of course) that we forgot to digest the first one when I was a fetus, leading to all sorts of fuckery when I was a pubescent teen and resulting in the first of my seven knee surgeries at the age of 14. Ah, band camp. . . 

But they took that little sample and sent it off to some lab in Massachusetts (yes, my friend and my brother in Boston both joked about visiting it) to grow a big ol’ chunk of new cartilage to patch into my knee. (”Like filling in a pothole” - my eloquent surgeon.) And in July they went in and flipped my kneecap entirely over and indeed patched the 3.9 CENTIMETER pothole/defect/affected area in my patella. Do you know how big a kneecap is? Google claims that the mean patella width is 3.79 cm. So I imagine I now have approximately 95% new cartilage on my knee, grafted in with some porcine membrane, and a nice long incision above my old, scarred over incision from my third knee surgery. . . 

Anyways, I took two full weeks off from the surgery and this week I have been working remotely. Except my boss left on vacation and didn’t tell me what my focus should be. And my focus is absolutely shot after a year of escalating burnout and deepening apathy and also the responsible use of percocet to assist in my recovery. And I started physical therapy this week which has been a whole thing but ultimately leaves me feeling like a hollowed-out shadow camped out on a glacier after just 40 minutes of “can you squeeze this muscle?”.

The upside is that I have gotten more rest in the last 2.5 weeks than I have in a long time and my brain is slowly starting to spin into creative mode even if it’s not yet ready for work-creative. So maybe I will finish writing a novel sometime before the next century.

And because I use tumblr as a journaling exercise, be prepared for my blog to just sort of kick into a high gear of my rambles. I’m going to attempt to sort out by topic (yes, you’ll be getting a Sarah J. Maas thought stream) but I also can’t really make too many promises.