I was looking back through the blog posts the other week – I think it might have been when I was writing our Christmas letter, which would have made that late November, but don’t quote me on that – when I came across the post in which my hip issues started. I read it, feeling slightly baffled.
So it’s a really bummer that as I was doing my evening treadmill walk on Thursday night, that old air-bubble feeling in the ball-and-socket joint came back on the left side. Note to self: Avoid treadmill incline 5 and above… Ice and rest and anti-inflammatories this weekend, and then stretching. And no incline over 4 from now on. I was doing so well on the walking too, but I know I can’t push this one. It’s an overuse injury, and I need to bring the swelling down. And maybe go back for another spectacular set of bruises from ART if it doesn’t settle in short order. 🙂
Huh. Really.
Now, just shy of eleven months later, and I’m doing a massage a week to just maintain my current mobility, and have an appointment with a neurologist and after that, a rheumatologist. I feel like I was naive back then, but I wasn’t. Not really. I could never have predicted the… stubbornness of this particular round of difficulty.
But yes. Eleven months. And as those eleven months crawled by with their myriad appointments and recovery periods, the blogging part of the blog and podcast started to slow to a trickle. I regret that. I don’t think there was much of a choice, considering how beat up I was getting (am still getting), but I still regret it. And I continue to regret it. I feel like I have missed out on documenting the craziness of this round, and what I have done with my limited spare time to keep my mental health in as good a state as I can. I feel like I have not followed through on my commitment to rediscovering my voice, my written voice, that I put out in the first episode of the podcast.
But although I haven’t necessarily been posting as regularly as I wanted to, that hasn’t stopped me from planning posts. Lots of posts. Lots and lots and LOTS of posts. In my head. And with my camera, if I’m going to be completely honest. Something happens, I think, “Oh, that’d make a good blog post!”, I document it photographically, sketch it out in my head, and then it comes to the evening, and… Yeah.
You would love the posts in my head. Some of them are funny and witty, others are thoughtful, still others are interesting and filled with information and insights into fibre arts. I think they’re pretty good, anyway.
Of course, they’re all pretty dated now. You know, being months old and all… Heck, even this post, I’ve been writing in my head for well over two weeks. Go figure.
I’m not going to go all the way back through the posts in my head, but I’m going to try and get a few more of them out of my brain and onto the Interwebs, even if they’re shorter, or not as well illustrated with pictures, or even if they’re illustrated with iPhone or iPad pictures rather than nice camera pictures. Because I know now this is not a short-haul injury. This is a lifestyle change, a new reality, and darn it, I need to add the writing back in, if only because it’s a voice that needs to be heard.
So we’ll start with a short post-from-my-head, from Christmas time.
Do you all remember the OpArt? It didn’t stay completely square once I unpinned it, but it was still okay, and I decided to be happy with it, and trundled down to Calgary for Christmas with it in tow, as I didn’t get to it in time to mail it. So there I was Christmas Eve, and I asked my mother if she had any baby-themed wrapping paper and a card so I could get the blanket wrapped up and ready to give to the parents-to-be when I saw them Boxing Day. We ended up finding a nice blank card and some not-quite-Christmas paper that would work, and so I went out into the kitchen to wrap it up. I folded it into a nice size, and was just kind of petting it when I noticed a hair.
I have long hair, and darkish brown, and it tends to get everywhere, so I thought nothing of it at first. Just pick it off and throw it away, right? Right? But it resisted my efforts at removing it. And looking closer, I realized why.
It was knit in. Through knitting, washing, drying, pinning, blocking, ironing, all of it, I hadn’t noticed. I’d knit one of my hairs in, to a white section, of course. Now, I’m sure there’s all kinds of superstitions around such endeavours, maybe relating to gifts for possible lovers or some such, but all I could think when I saw it was, “In a WHITE section? SERIOUSLY????”
I couldn’t wrap the blanket up knowing it was there, right there, right on top. I tried to pull it out, but it had gotten itself all wrapped around the yarn and itself and wasn’t going to be so easy. So I grabbed myself a needle and picked it out, stitch by stitch.
The good news is that despite the errant hair, the blanket was well appreciated by the parents-to-be. The baby was born last month, and is doing well, hopefully often snuggled in a striped, swirly, garter-stitch blanket into which I’m sure is knit more than just the one long, curly, brown hair.
