At the end of my last post, which was 2 weeks post-op, my greatest activity in a single day was walking 2x500m (14:45/km pace) to go out for brunch, which exhausted me and caused me to spend the afternoon asleep. It wasn’t much longer (start of Week 3, I think) before the afternoon naps were no longer required.
I continued to build up the walking, only finding my limit on one occasion. On Day 18 I walked 1km (I’m claiming it even though my recording was 40m shy) in the morning, then went out for another walk late in the afternoon. At the end of an alley I contemplated: turn back, turn left or turn right. The correct answer, with hindsight, was to turn back. I turned right, and 100m later gave serious consideration to calling Mick to come and pick me up. But I battled on, taking micro-steps, and made it home having covered another 900m. I hadn’t done anything that wasn’t recommended, but the abdominal discomfort was, well, uncomfortable. The following day I was fine and my pace had increased to just slower than 13 minutes per kilometre.
On Day 22 we went out for cake (or a sausage butty in Mick’s case)…
On Day 24 Strava assessed (quite rightly) my 1.4km walk (still at 13 min/km pace), as ‘harder than your usual effort’. How quickly things can change! The following day I broke through the mile, and three days later through 2km.
Incidentally, it wasn’t all walking. I was also knitting…
…vetting TGO Challenge Route Sheets, and making TGO Challenge videos.
Day 31 was the next big thing. Mick drove me to a local nature reserve where we left the car and set out to walk 1.5km up the hilliest road around. With the car then being 1.5km away, we then walked back. Whilst 90m of ascent doesn’t sound like much, some of those inclines are steep. The uphills also proved to be tuggy on the scar, but I’m told that tugging at the scar is good.
On Day 35 we took a day-trip to Halifax, hitting traffic both ways and I learnt that sitting in a passenger seat of a moving vehicle requires the use of one’s core muscles for stabilisation. My core muscles, as a result of having been severed and needing to heal, hadn’t been used for five weeks and perhaps five hours in the car was a bit much for the first big outing. Goodness, how my abs ached the following day; it was like I’d done an inadvisable number of sit-ups. I was also surprisingly exhausted, which is quite probably what triggered the migraine of the following day, which in turn cancelled our next intended trip: an overnight outing to Lincoln in Bertie, to allow Mick to attend a RAF reunion do.
Fortunately, once I recovered from the Halifax trip, things seemed to improve in leaps and bounds. By Day 42 (six weeks post-op) I was feeling much more healed.
It was just a few days ago, on 8 December, that I finally hit 5km in a single walk and declared that I am now suitably mended to walk however far I want, at a reasonable pace (I averaged 9:30/km on this one).
The only real ongoing niggle is that the lymphatic drainage pathways on my stomach have been interrupted by the surgery, and as each day goes on, the tissue above the scar becomes swollen. It’s worse the more I do (to my mind, if I move around it should encourage the fluid to move, but it seems it doesn’t work like that when the drainage routes have been cut off). It’s doing me no harm, but it’s not comfortable. Compression knickers and leggings are my friends.
(*'steeking' is where you cut a knitted garment, for example you may knit a cardigan effectively as a jumper then cut up the front to make it into a cardi - it means that you can do colour work without troubling with purl stitches and also allows you to knit the garment it in one piece, thus not needing to sew panels together. My hoody involves steeking, and so did this swatch, but I've opted to show it in its pre-cut state so you can't see the hash I made of the colour work pattern on the other side!)
Sounding satisfactory. I see you met up with Martin and Sue. I'm nursing the ulcerated wound rear od shin with weekly visits to my GP's nurse - A long job so no walking unless my patience gives in.
ReplyDeleteI'm no medic, so pay no heed to what I say, but given that leg ulcers are related to reduced blood flow, and as walking gets the blood flowing, I would have thought that walking would be good for their healing. Clearly, given my comments in this post about the oedema above my incision, my theories on these matters don't always hold true!
DeleteHope you're finding enough entertainment at home in the absence of walking. How many of your modelling supplies have crept back out?
Your knitting output is astounding, more so because of the complicated patterns which I guess must take longer to do?
ReplyDeleteI have had quite a lot of time to knit over the last couple of months! The Christmas jumpers were pretty quick - mine more so than Mick's as it only involved two colours in any one row. Mick's involved three colours (and annoyingly I kept getting so focused on controlling the three colours and catching the floats of each colour in the back of the work that I was forgetting to do the increases, which involved a bit of swearing and even more unknitting), which was quite a bit slower and stopped me from watching TV at the same time. Other than the colour work, it was just straight knitting, on reasonably big needles, so little concentration was needed.
DeleteThe hoody will be slower going, as the whole thing is patterned (but still all knit stitches), but probably still faster than the cable jumper I made in 2019 where there were no runs of pure knit stitches in any of it.
I agree about the walking, but the troubled area is rear of my shin at the level where boot collar would rub. However, I can get away with trainers but am a bit reluctant, but all is not lost. I have moved all my modelling stuff to the spare bedroom where a bed once resided. That means I go up and down my stairs at least twenty time a day I guess so I am getting some exercise.
ReplyDelete