S'up Slut?

[Alex2507]

120/88 FTW. Knee's screamin'. More meds on the way. I miss the celobrex. When this last pill and ice take effect I'll go walk for maybe 8 minutes. That 12 minute walk yesterday yielded a 6 pain level in the night. And then I sprouted a vagina. At least I'm not gonna have a stroke and the nurse said the # that set the alarm on Monday was 170/120. That's got to be a personal best.

Tram, even after 6 whiskies does absolutely nothing for me.....

After 6 whiskies, what more do you need? But now I know I need 6 whiskies.

 

[Alex2507]

Back to the 'mine's bigger' theme. Left knee is 18 5/8" but the right is a whopping 2 1/4 bigger at 20 7/8".
Seated position with joint at 90 measured right about where you would choke somebody if you painted their face on your knee cap.

I thought there was gonna be a prize for top blood pressure. I won, right?

 

[Alex2507]

I stubbed my pinky toe's neighbor into my cane a few days ago. Today I ran my big toe over with the vacuum. Maybe I shouldn't drive.

 

[Irvrobinson]

I stubbed my pinky toe's neighbor into my cane a few days ago. Today I ran my big toe over with the vacuum. Maybe I shouldn't drive.

Well, Alex, at one time you convinced me to try bi-amping my Salon2s, and now you've convinced me with this thread that I'm never having a knee replacement.

BTW, the Salon2s are still bi-amped. I was going to put the configuration back to normal, since it made no audible difference whatsoever, and then a colleague saw my system and the dual cables, and proceeded to give me a lecture about how useless it was and how passive crossovers worked. I was proud of myself; I listened patiently. But now the Salon2s stay bi-amped forever, just to annoy the know-it-alls.

 

[Alex2507]

Well, Alex, at one time you convinced me to try bi-amping my Salon2s, and now you've convinced me with this thread that I'm never having a knee replacement.

BTW, the Salon2s are still bi-amped. I was going to put the configuration back to normal, since it made no audible difference whatsoever, and then a colleague saw my system and the dual cables, and proceeded to give me a lecture about how useless it was and how passive crossovers worked. I was proud of myself; I listened patiently. But now the Salon2s stay bi-amped forever, just to annoy the know-it-alls.

I can think of 2 advantages to leaving it biamped. Leaving it alone works for every lazy man. Plus you have a spare amp channel in place if ever need be. I guess annoying people is the most rewarding reason.

At the beginning of the knee odyssey, I was told that when the pain got bad enough, I would be requesting a transplant. I made it about 5 years. I'm thinking my left knee might make it another year or two before I have it replaced. My recovery is idyllic, like a fairy tale ... except for the pain. About 2 days ago I turned a corner and the pain level went down. I cut back on the pills and the pain level stayed down with a couple of crazy incidences where the air goes into your lungs but it still makes a sound as the pain makes the universe go backwards.

I'm not convinced you're not having a replacement. If the joint degenerates, you're going to see what real convincing is about.

 

[Swerd]

Well, Alex, at one time you convinced me to try bi-amping my Salon2s, and now you've convinced me with this thread that I'm never having a knee replacement.

Never say never. 1) You replace a knee only when your old knee has become unusable. 2) You might not be such a big cry-baby as Alex is.

BTW, the Salon2s are still bi-amped. I was going to put the configuration back to normal, since it made no audible difference whatsoever, and then a colleague saw my system and the dual cables, and proceeded to give me a lecture about how useless it was and how passive crossovers worked. I was proud of myself; I listened patiently. But now the Salon2s stay bi-amped forever, just to annoy the know-it-alls.

After a lecture like that, I'd be tempted to add these to each speaker cable. They're meant to make watertight covers for outdoor extension cord connections. Tell your friend that you made custom designed 'networks' for your speaker cables. They're available in green, brown, or safety orange. I suggest the orange so the thickheaded colleague can't miss them.

 

[Alex2507]

Never say never. 1) You replace a knee only when your old knee has become unusable. 2) You might not be such a big cry-baby as Alex is.
After a lecture like that, I'd be tempted to add these to each speaker cable. They're meant to make watertight covers for outdoor extension cord connections. Tell your friend that you made custom designed 'networks' for your speaker cables. They're available in green, brown, or safety orange. I suggest the orange so the thickheaded colleague can't miss them.

I'd opt for like nice looking cable elevators. That orange is unnecessarily ugly. Are you still rocking that green wire?

 

[Swerd]

I'd opt for like nice looking cable elevators. That orange is unnecessarily ugly. Are you still rocking that green wire?

Those green wires have grown darker, almost black. It mellows out the sound. Everyone knows darker speaker cables mellow out the high Q resonant modes.

Because I am a irreconcilable geek, I am compelled to offer an explanation. The green wires in question are vintage 12 gauge zip cord speaker wires. They've been mellowing since I bought them in ~2002. They are coated with PVC insulation – once they were clear – but gradually they acquired a coat of green copper oxide under the insulation. Typical of Chinese made crap — the manufacturer was too cheap to add the extra chemical component to the PVC polymerization reaction to mop up the excess un-reacted chlorides. I've been too lazy to change them.

 

[Alex2507]

Typical of Chinese made crap

TLS wept ...

BTW, if I were TLS or anybody who actually knew medicine, I wouldn't chime in here either. This is serious. Even in terms of drywall, I try to avoid discussions with people who are gonna f^%& sh!t up no matter what you tell them. I admit it is a discipline I have yet to master. If I knew medicine, I'd leave people in my position alone, under the care of their medical team (and what a team it is).

The thread is, as Swerd points out, a place for me to cry. Like right now, how did my coffee cup get so empty? Even I stayed away from the thread as I waited to see if I was gonna slip off into opiate addiction or if I was going to find my way through the maze of pills, PT and pain. Not that I'm out of the woods but the pain is receding and the first fruits of scaling back the narcotics is getting 4 hours of broken sleep. That's a vast improvement over the 1 or 2 hours I've been getting. I've had a world class scowl for years now but this look of Jaundiced Jesus with the black bags under my eyes just scares little children.

My girl and I have been getting along so beautifully while she sleeps through my nights. During these periods of long silence I find myself experiencing weird emotional stuff that I'm ill equipped to talk about. It just gets worse when she wakes up and makes coffee for us. She's a quiet one in the mornings so my unbound love flourishes while I yearn for the talk that will inevitably destroy the tender feelings fostered by silence. But she better get the f^%& up and make that coffee.

I'm kind of honored to have 'convinced' Irv to biamp so I told my girl about it and briefly mentioned that biamping is considered to be a fool's errand by most. She says to me, "you gave him bad advice"? As if Irv is looking to me for advice.

Two hours into this pill and I'm thinking to walk around outside for a while with my Štap. I may as well learn to post pic's again, now that photobucket ... did whatever.
Anyway, I gotta do this while the pill lets me.

I'm still looking to understand why Pandora cuts out on me. Is it because the computer is dormant?

What's the photobucket replacement? Flicker? I'm not clear on how to use attachments either. I load pic's onto the computer from an sd card.

Help me show you my Štap.

 

[Alex2507]

Well, that was about an hour's worth of walking around. I took out the trash, got the mail, visited my truck to change up the stack of cd's I listen to.

This streaming music thing is kind of cool. The girl said she wanted to go to the beach for a few hours with a friend while it's still summer. I'm all like, yeah, sure, it's a nice day, have fun ... but I have 'Don't Go' by Yaz playing on repeat. I'm not sure if it's getting through to her but I'm sick of it by now.

... and the knee is awake. So here's why medical people ought to stay away. I'm gonna take 500mg of Tylenol because adtg says it works faster than generic apap and it's a step down from the 650 mg I was cleared to take at once with a daily max of 3g. So if ANYTHING goes wrong, it's on him. I just need a quick fix while I ice this pig up. I think I took oxy and 325 mg apap at ~4:00 AM according to the last post. Good thing for that post because I forgot to log that in my phone. Anyway the game is to quiet the knee and not take the next oxy until I need it for the other obnoxious sh!t I'm gonna do to it as soon as it's not killing me.

It's probably the oxy but I am enjoying me some tunes.

Okay, pic's as attachments are too big,



See if that works

Whoa ...



It's Ipe. Probably 1.8 lbs of the world's most dense wood ... or close to it. I've been polishing this thing like crazy. How come photobucket works?

 

[Alex2507]

The war hammer is 1 lb 7 oz. 13 hours in between doses is maybe a little ambitious. I figure I better do the PT stuff before the last dose is too far away to help. This story is so close to being called The Call to Addiction it's not even funny ... except it is kind of funny. It would be even funnier if it were happening to some one else. Anybody else ...

I totally get the Nancy Karrigan 'why me' cry. My girl threw out the idea of my doc prescribing something to make me mellow out. I'm f^%&ing mellow, alright ?!?

PT pain, coming right up.

 

[Alex2507]

 

[Irvrobinson]

I'm kind of honored to have 'convinced' Irv to biamp so I told my girl about it and briefly mentioned that biamping is considered to be a fool's errand by most. She says to me, "you gave him bad advice"? As if Irv is looking to me for advice.

You can tell her that I had two extra amp channels just sitting there idling, and in a box in a closet I had all the necessary cables (including a pair of custom-made Blue Jeans XLR splitters), so it didn't cost me an incremental dime. Passive bi-amping also does no audible harm. But now that I know it bugs my EE friends, I think it's priceless, and your advice was awesome! After I first did it, one know-it-all thought I was just bi-wiring (he didn't look at the back of the amp) and I got an especially good lecture about that. The only way I could generate more controversy is by wearing a MAGA hat. (Alright, cable lifters would do that too, but that's crossing a line with me.)

I hope you feel better soon, Alex.

 

[Alex2507]

I hope you feel better soon, Alex.

It was a short lived rough patch. Thank God. There's like a bad spot where the narcotics are enough to mess your head up but not enough to reach the pain. The pain and the buzz role into one and on top of being inescapable, your whole being is whatever your knee is ... and your mind is gone. It was only a couple of hours though and PT, time and Tylenol took care of it. That's when you start getting ideas about doubling up on the oxy. I ended up just getting up and moving around, walking, icing, stretching until the knee stopped hurting and my head cleared.

I'm close to 12 hours away from the last oxy and not hurting. Not sleeping but not hurting so that's good. In the back of my head I worry that those bouts might be withdrawal related. They don't seem to be, yet, and if they were, I suppose I would just have to deal with it. It's all about the knee. The knee the knee the knee. I don't care that it hurts. I don't care if I'm a junky. I don't care that Trump is making America great again. This f^%&ing knee is gonna work.

I've been wide awake for 2 hours and had 2 cups of coffee. I'm gonna figure out a doping schedule ... wait, coffee loves asprin and Tylenol. Yeah, that idea is giving me warm fuzzies already. Okay, that happened at 4:30 so let's fire up the oxy at 7:30. By 5:30 the home brew Excedrin will be in full swing so a ... 20 minute walk, followed by ice, food and eventually the happy pill. So ... by 7 or 8 tonight ... another happy pill? One thing I have figured out is the pills are for pain and not using them as needed is just as detrimental to progress as being a junky is detrimental to life. If I die a junky it will be with a knee that f^%&ing works. Right now I'm practically pain free. That's gonna change.

Why is Photobucket working for me?

Another good reason for me to drop Facebook is that I don't want people who actually do know me and where I live to know that I have oxy's. My first PT guy explained that addicts will befriend and if need be, rob you once they know you be holding too. So ... stay away from my stash, man!

Here come the pain ...

Edit: See? how is this happening? Am I gonna have to PM one of you guys?



I had such a good time doing this. I ended up cooking the surrounds on one speaker by having it too close to a heater and then swapping out the drivers from the speakers I had from KEW and letting Eddy of the deck use them in his HT.



MOST important edit: No cable lifters needed when you know what Bo don't know ...



This place is as bad as FB for time but at least it has provided me with exceptional sounding systems.

 

[Alex2507]

Whoops !!! ... I didn't have my pants on earlier.



Plus there's baseboard there now ... we're not savages.

On schedule with PT, pain's low, pill's in place (not kicked in though). May as well look around for places that do aqua therapy. Things are lookin' up, b!tches.

Maybe in an hour, when the happy comes, I'll tear it a new one so I have something to cry about later.

Gentlemen, enjoy your week.

 

[Alex2507]

Home PT and nurse visits are over. This coming Thursday, I go to a rehab center w/ a pool.

I can walk with a 95% normal gate for about 100' w/ no cane. It hurts. Life sucks.

15 hours since my last dose of oxy. That's real good 'cause I'm runnin' the f^%& out. About a week ago that scared me. Now it's just good times in the mirror.

I gotta get clear of the oxy before I start smoking and drinking again. This is not where good choices start. Last time I wanted a drink this bad ... I think never.

BSA, thanks for the BT headphone rec's. Life sucks a little less. In the house it's the cans and for my short but mandatory walks up the building stairs (14 steps), trash and mail runs and walks through the parking lot, it's the ear buds. Lucky that I stepped up to an iPhone 5 from my flip phone about a year ago. Used at low-ish volumes, both those products work well enough for the money. I'm looking forward to mindless bike and leg press stuff with these toys. I think Pandora has me on the hook for the $100/yr thing though. Or maybe just /month during rehab. Either way, that has been a welcome diversion.

I had to look down and check to see if I was wearing pants. It's time to boogie. I wonder when I'm gonna have to take the happy pill. I stretched a little, drank coffee, am gonna do the walking part of PT plus a full round of screaming stretches and get out in the world. I often think how it felt to jump off the garage roof right in front of my father when he told me to stop jumping off the roof and get down (meaning with a ladder). Real regrets ... it's going on 16 hours and I'm all in on the stop the pain train now, oxy, giggle bush, PT, Protein, Curcumin BCM-95, vitamin D, almonds, pears

see ya

 

[KEW]

Well, that was about an hour's worth of walking around. I took out the trash, got the mail, visited my truck to change up the stack of cd's I listen to.

This streaming music thing is kind of cool. The girl said she wanted to go to the beach for a few hours with a friend while it's still summer. I'm all like, yeah, sure, it's a nice day, have fun ... but I have 'Don't Go' by Yaz playing on repeat. I'm not sure if it's getting through to her but I'm sick of it by now.

... and the knee is awake. So here's why medical people ought to stay away. I'm gonna take 500mg of Tylenol because adtg says it works faster than generic apap and it's a step down from the 650 mg I was cleared to take at once with a daily max of 3g. So if ANYTHING goes wrong, it's on him. I just need a quick fix while I ice this pig up. I think I took oxy and 325 mg apap at ~4:00 AM according to the last post. Good thing for that post because I forgot to log that in my phone. Anyway the game is to quiet the knee and not take the next oxy until I need it for the other obnoxious sh!t I'm gonna do to it as soon as it's not killing me.

It's probably the oxy but I am enjoying me some tunes.

Okay, pic's as attachments are too big,



See if that works

Whoa ...



It's Ipe. Probably 1.8 lbs of the world's most dense wood ... or close to it. I've been polishing this thing like crazy. How come photobucket works?

Ipe is great stuff! Virtually weather-proof/rot-resistant!
But it is not something to work with without respiratory protection! Also a good idea to wear long sleeves and gloves to prevent dust accrual on sweaty arms and topical absorption.
I dated a widowed woman for a while and she said her husband's health decline happened as he was DIY'ing their deck out of Ipe. He did not do the research or maybe believed since he was working outside, did not need to be concerned about the dust. Aside from the normal irritation of wood dust, Ipe is pretty toxic stuff.
It'll also dull a blade pretty fast (due to high mineral content IIRC)!
Great material for a walking cane/war hammer, just don't go reshaping it with a power sander without taking appropriate precautions.

 

[Alex2507]

The pharmacist says I'm not a junky. I thought I might have gone into withdrawal but it looks like I just got sick a couple of days ago and then stopped taking oxy because I couldn't eat. PT chick effed me up yesterday and I'm back on oxy but I started splitting the pills because 5 mg is as small as they get. I had it down to 5 mg 2x/day and sometimes 1x/day.

2.5 mg was just enough to put me back to sleep in the wee hours.

My average has been 2.5 pills/day (12.5 mg) for the last almost 8 weeks. The frequency has dropped off from 3 or 4 per day to 1 or 2.

In morphine equivalents, 10 mg of oxy (my daily maximum) is 30 mg of morphine. Seven weeks of that coupled with sleep deprivation ... not a good look. Using a half dose to buy another 3 hours sleep might be the drug's new primary function. The pain is obviously more manageable and the PT crew has been highly effective. I've used my cane more for the unoperated knee in the last few days than for the operated knee. The PT thing is partly about doing and partly about doing it slowly. That's kind of an interesting learning experience.

Here's an interesting write up that defines tolerance, dependence and addiction.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851054/

Basically, this means that I shouldn't have any trouble stepping away from these drugs and I'll be able to use them in the future much as I have in the past.

Remember the Adam Ant tune saying 'Don't drink, don't smoke, what do you do?' Oxy when I need too. I'd rather be able to have an honest drink but I guess every body got dealt a different hand.

Oh hey, cupping! So the PT chick sticks 8 small clear suction cups around my knee and has me walk, march and raise my heel toward my bum a bunch of times claiming it helps reduce swelling by redistributing fluids, manipulating something called fascia and some other stuff that flew over my head. So my first thought was 'no' but she's pretty cute so I said 'okay'. Really, only one of us needs to be in charge so I told her to run the PT as she saw fit and to enlighten me along the way.

The difference between what she's up to and what I'm reading about on line is that she is focused on one area for specific benefits using safe equipment.

I think the suction cups lock that area's muscles together so when you do stretch, it really stretches the affected area. When the cups come off, those muscles are looser than they've been in weeks and of course the entire rotted out joint has been removed so ... the procedure sells itself. She's going to see if she can find her course book for the references they used to support their claims.

The suction is applied by a metered hand pump so blood isn't gonna pour out my skin nor is my skin gonna burn from using cups heated on an open flame.

In short: voodoo.

 

[KEW]

Congrats!
Cute therapist is a definite win!
If you have to tolerate someone putting you in pain, it is a less bitter pill to swallow if it comes from a cute girl!
You might as well take advantage of the distraction of attraction!

But, word to the wise - don't suggest alternate uses for the suction hand pump until your treatment is concluding!

 

[Alex2507]

Congrats!
Cute therapist is a definite win!
If you have to tolerate someone putting you in pain, it is a less bitter pill to swallow if it comes from a cute girl!
You might as well take advantage of the distraction of attraction!

It's a funny thing. She's cute but I don't want to make her feel cute. I want her to feel like she's responsible for my recovery and I'm doing my best to help her succeed. We're workin, Boss, workin'! Seriously, I need her focused and believe me, it's hard to stay focused if I'm trying to f^%& you.

I tied a shoulder injury back to my knee by saying it was from using that arm to support my bum knee which enabled the PT to include using an arm bike for a few minutes every visit. Those 6 minutes are killing my upper body because I've grown soft. I've got 2 scheduled visits left with her and 2 more with the pool dude. I'll probably angle for more PT and then for after, I've secured a script for aqua therapy for my unoperated knee. Being in water for 1-1/2 years on my own was one thing but these guys know stuff. I want to get as much as I can out of them before I go back to hitting the pool a couple of time per week on my own.

Is this what I am now? A gym guy?

... I guess ... if that's what it takes ...

2.5 mg of oxy 11 hours ago and not yet ready to rob a bank. That's good, right?