rivka

I'm having a ground-glass-in-the-hip joint day, for reasons which utterly pass understanding. It's not the place it usually hurts, and it's not the usual sensation - it's more like it used to feel ten years ago.

I am not jumping to conclusions that something is horribly wrong. I am not.

In other news, my SiteMeter for Respectful of Otters was down over the weekend, and I found it dreadfully wounding to the ego. Especially before I figured out that the problem was SiteMeter, and not a dramatic falloff in popularity. Clearly I need to find sounder bases for my self-esteem.

I have a Thing about shoes.

No, not the stereotypical woman's Thing about shoes. Buying shoes ranks approximately one millionth on my list of favorite things to do. I wear my shoes, quite literally, to pieces. I walked around for six weeks this summer with a hole in the bottom of my sandal, inadequately fixed with duct tape. Then I got the sandals resoled so I wouldn't have to buy new ones. On my lone pair of pumps, the heel is worn down to the plastic underneath the sole. I'm pissed off about it because I only bought them, like, a year and a half ago and I wasn't supposed to have to buy new pumps for a long time. My sneakers are worn down so that the undersole is exposed. My loafers have come partly unstitched. Every pair of shoes I have needs to be replaced, except for the resoled sandals and my hiking boots.
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Howard Dean released a disability rights platform today. I'm so pleased - and also surprised, actually. It's a very thorough set of positions, and even in the press release it's evident that he understands the impact of different disability laws and programs. He really seems to get it.

Kerry is the only other Democratic candidate with a disability platform, as far as I can tell, and it's kind of sketchy. Edwards has a statement about increasing medical research on disabilities in the section of his website about his health care views. Lieberman, Kucinich, Gephardt, Mosely-Braun, and Sharpton don't seem to have disability platforms, as far as I can tell from their websites.

1. The hospital bill from my hip replacement. Not counting the bills from the surgeon and the anesthetist, which were sent separately, it came to $20,055.30, of which I was obliged to pay $593.09 myself. I find that in 1997 a single morphine injection cost $42.39, which seems high given the street price of heroin. Operating room time cost $14.50 per minute after an initial base charge of $688.50. My artificial hip itself was billed in several pieces - the stem cost $4,375, the head $711, and the acetabular cup $1,875. The whole melange was held together with screws ranging in price from $135-$405. I was also charged for three "space suit sterile view gowns," which at $275.25 were each nearly as expensive as my wedding dress ($315). Fascinating.

2. A Lesbian Avengers flyer, written by me. It's protesting a bill that would have made it illegal for an unmarried woman to be artificially inseminated. Excerpt: "The only thing Kevin Mannix's bill accomplishes is to make it illegal to have a baby without first having sex with a man. Having a baby is a very private thing. How a woman gets pregnant is none of Kevin's business. Why is it so important to Kevin that would-be mothers have sex with men? Kevin Mannix: He's not pro-family, he's pro-penis." Okay, I know, but give me a break. I was only twenty.

3. My first love letter from Michael. He left it on the table in my apartment after he'd been up to visit me for a week. I'm not quoting from this one, but reading it still brings tears of joy to my eyes.

4. The menu for our wedding. I remember nothing about the food, except that I kept taking one bite of cake and putting the piece down, and then the next time I looked it would be gone. I see that we had smoked salmon, grilled brie on pesto, cold poached shrimp, fresh melon and berries, spicy Duxelle meatballs, petite quiches, seafood stuffed mushrooms, and cake. Okay. I hope it was good.

5. A picture of my ex, Lane. She'd dramatically asked for all my pictures of her back, so I thought I didn't have any anymore. Finding this one was a bit of a shock. It's a great picture - we were on the teacups at Disneyland, and she's grinning madly and her hair is flying all over the place. I don't want to keep it, though. I gave it to Michael and he threw it away for me.

6. My personal suicide note from Hilary. Hilary was my girlfriend when I was nineteen. She left a general suicide note to the world, but she also wrote some personal letters. The note's paper-clipped in to the journal I was keeping at the time. The day before she died, I had just started my journal up again after a gap of several months, and I wrote, "Hilary just called, really depressed. She says transitions are hard for her." I'm not going to quote from the suicide note either. I'll just say that it was loving.

I don't know what makes me save some things. The momentous stuff, sure. But why do I still have address labels for my last apartment in Iowa?

I just sent my dissertation advisor an e-mail describing the results of my first pass through the data analysis and asking where he thinks I should go from here. It occurred to me that maybe some of my booster section - all of whom are too kind or too well-trained to actually ask me how my dissertation's going - would like to know about the results as they emerge.

Very quick summary/review: My dissertation is about whether children with physical disabilities are at greater risk of parental abuse, and which parent, child, and family factors may affect the likelihood that parents will abuse their disabled children. My major outcome variable is the likelihood that parents will select physical punishment responses to slides of children misbehaving. (See explanation here)
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It's not supposed to snow like this in Maryland.

I just bundled up and stepped out onto the patio. Two steps from the door, the snow was knee deep. It's nearly up to our windowsills, and still it keeps falling. We're told we can expect it to keep snowing all night and much of the day tomorrow.

We're nicely stocked up with movies, food, and whisky. As long as the power stays on we should be perfectly comfortable. Stir crazy, perhaps, but comfortably so.

It's not supposed to snow like this in Maryland.

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I want to clarify what I said in my last post. No, of course I don't think that my parents would have availed themselves of euthanasia, had Peter Singer gotten to them. And, although it was kind of people to say good things about my presence in their lives, I didn't really need to be reassured that my life was worth sparing.

My point, which I guess I didn't make very well, is that even without Dr. Singer's poisonous arguments, it was already hard enough for my mother to advocate for my needs and get my doctors to think of me as a human being whose suffering was worthy of consideration. How much harder would it have been for her if otherwise reasonable people around her had been expounding the philosophy that infants - especially disabled infants - weren't even really conscious beings?

The knee I scraped last Thursday still hurts. I tried uncovering over the weekend, but found that taking off the bandage increased the pain considerably. At one point, when I was complaining about it, I joked to curiousangel, "Sometimes it must be hard to believe that I've had major surgery." "Sometimes," he agreed.

Here's the thing, though: I think that it's actually easier for me to cope with serious, expectable pain than to cope with minor, unexpected pain. ( medical/surgical details below )

So curiousangel and I joined a gym.

This is so utterly unlike me that I can't even believe I typed the sentence. I'm the one who always had a doctor's note to be excused from gym class. I'm the one who walked with crutches five and a half years ago, and had to give serious thought to whether I was up to walking two city blocks. And while the bionic hip has done me worlds of good, I still have such a feeling of awkwardness and alienation from physical activity that the idea of me voluntarily going somewhere people exercise is just... well. I never would have imagined it.

But we've been trying to stick with the program we started last May, exercising every day, and that's been hard to do in 100-degree heat. And both of us have been feeling like we want to do something besides walking for our exercise time. So here we are with gym memberships. And Tuesday evening, I'll meet for the first time with my personal trainer. (I shake my head in disbelief. Me, Rivka, with a personal trainer.)

I've been thinking about what I'll want her to know about me - because my body and its needs and abilities are, um, pretty complicated and non-standard, and so are my feelings about physical activity. So I've been trying to figure out what needs to be said before we get started. (I'm expecting her to call me Monday night, because I have logistical questions, so I'll probably let her know some of the basic stuff then.) I'm mostly writing this down to clarify things in my head, but you're also welcome to comment or make suggestions if you'd like.

( so I'll want her to know about... )

In a few minutes, I need to head out the door and down to the marina. I'm helping Ben with the Easter Seals "Cruise for Kids," in which boaters organize to take severely disabled kids and their families out for a day on the harbor.

I should mention at this point that most disabled-children charities make me extremely uncomfortable, Jerry "You don't want to be pitied because you're in a wheelchair? Stay in your house." Lewis especially, but at first glance the Easter Seals people look okay. And I'm liking the idea that I'll be down there, visibly disabled, as an ordinary part of a boat crew rather than as either (a) a recipient of charity, or (b) a carefully selected and lauded "role model." I think it's good for disabled kids to see that, and know that it's possible.

I leave you with a link, courtesy of my favorite weblog of all time, Theresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Light: Monty Python stuffed toys. Including a live parrot, who is just resting.

So, a good night of dancing on Monday - right up until the middle of a fairly rowdy walk-through of Picking Up Sticks, when Paul accidentally tripped me. Or tripped over me. I'm not clear of the sequence. I was doing the steps, and paying attention to my partner, and laughing, and then suddenly I was completely off-balance and trying hard not to fall.

That was probably my mistake. I should have fallen. But instead, I came down extremely hard on my right foot to balance myself, and the shock of it went all the way up to the hip.

In the moment, it didn't hurt enough to leave the dance. I staggered a bit and clutched Carl's arm, and I felt kind of light-headed. But I finished the walk-through and danced the dance and went to sit down, and then my hip started to ache persistently. And Paul came over to apologize, and I told him it was nothing to worry about - I was just going to sit out a dance to rest, and then I changed my mind and left altogether.

That was Monday, and today it still hurts. Nothing dramatic, just a quiet throbbing pain and some difficulty walking. I'm doing the things I know how t do, rest and heat and anti-inflammatories. I'm trying not to make a big deal out of it. It's still much less pain than I used to have every day. I can still walk. But it's a little scary to think about everyday pain coming back.

The ironic part of all this is that I've recently gotten into a rasseff discussion with aiglet about chronic pain and the things I've learned from it. I'm having superstitious thoughts that I should have left the topic severely alone.