Nice progress for two days

Making good progress after surgery in last two days. Mostly slept through the first 48 hours.

Switching to Ibuprofen from Vocodin is more difficult than I thought. Planning to pull through the weekend with a lot more sleep.

One handed typing is time consuming as well and it looks like the Dragon Nuance files from old laptop did not get copied to new laptop. No motivation to reteach the voice recognition software from scratch!

Thanks to all for your wishes..

Pics from Jr. and little one, both of them initially grossed out but have now come to accept the hand as some kind of science experiment that needs periodic observation..

(skip if you are easily grossed out)

On a side note, the plucked chicken shaved feel on the right hand feels good. Used to wonder if all those men in yoga class with that copper looking muscle tone lost all hair because of yoga? Maybe they just shaved?!

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The plate and screws are out!

The right hand is finally rid of the metal plate and screws!

Recovering after surgery..

Will be back to posting in a week.

The road to getting back the strength in the right hand is very visible now!

In a couple of months expected to get rid of pins and needles and the sudden loss in sensation in fingers as well.

So far so good!

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Excelling at your job

Physiotherapists know what they are doing! Can personally attest to it.

They measured my strength again today and my right hand was able to exert 45 lbs. It was 25-30 two weeks ago. I have to get to 80 to match my left hand and technically it should be close to 100 (me being right handed and all).

The hot wax works...

why, I do not know.. but it works and that is all that matters!

Get to lift some weights?! (which Jr. can do effortlessly, but I have to spend a lot of effort on), in this case 2 lbs (less than a kilogram)..

On second thought, am really proud of all the improvement.. from 1 lb to 2 lbs in one week!

Like the therapist says "One step at a time!" They sure know what they are doing and how to get you to make incremental progress.

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An interesting week

The temperatures dropped this week significantly. The hand which is still trying to close the gap in the bone, is feeling a lot of pain because somehow the metal pieces inside are stressing out the bone.

That has meant no sleep from 4AM to 6AM the first few days this week. Wrapping the entire arm in warm fleece blankets helped a lot.

Then the wife fell ill and between work, the kids calling me a "bad parent" and more pain in the wrist trying to exert myself, it has been a challenging week to say the least..

Going to do some camera accessory shopping tomorrow to cheer myself up.

This weeks photo homework assignment is "Bokeh" and it appears that I am way out of my league here.. Spent two hours to understand the concept (which is to highlight out of focus objects to create light patterns in the background)..

But here are some interesting results (going to work on this some more.. how they manage to get the object in the foreground in focus while still creating the shaped Bokeh is beyond me.. at least for now)

Cut out a star shaped hole on a cardboard and taped it to the focus ring..

Every point of light takes the star shape..

Notice Jr.'s eyes.. even her eyes show the star pattern (reflected from the flash).
Every light point on her necklace takes the shape of the star..

Cannot understand the physics behind it either. A flashback...

When we were going to IIT Physics coaching class, Balu Sir (god rest his soul) told us to go practice with MIR publishers book by Russian Authors "Tarasov and Tarasova" to master Geometrical Optics. There were no copies that we could get our hands on, but the platform book seller who used to have a shop at the bend near Nalli in Pondy Bazaar told me "Tarasov-aa thambi. Oru copy irukku pa.. aana Tamil copy, paravaa illiyaa?" (I have a copy kid, but it is in Tamil, you still want it?)

Two of my friends who saw me buy that book thought I was nuts. Understanding geometrical optics by reading a Russian book translated in Tamil?

Spent the next week understanding the terms for convex, concave, focus, object, image, radius of curvature etc. etc. in Tamil and figured it all out. It was actually very entertaining and rewarding.

But this Bokeh thing, beats Tarasov and Tarasova..

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Castaway

For starters this post is being typed with two hands..(okay, one hand with the occasional assistance from the second.

The cast did come off and there was much amusement and happiness!

The kids would have loved watching this, but they had to go to school. They have to watch this video to see how it was done.

The hand has made much progress over the last six plus weeks according to the doctors. I was not happy with the range of motion. For example I can type with the fingers but cannot move my wrist on the laptop. It has to be physically placed on the laptop with the other hand. How to describe it? Remember the plastic hands that were attached to Natraj pencils so you can use it to scratch your back? The hand is like that, unable to bend at the wrist.

The doctors were happy after measuring various angles with protractors etc. and are telling us that I may be from another planet or am extremely thick for expecting too much too soon. So the next month of various exercises, to be performed with same religious fervor as Sandhyavandhanam should apparently do the trick.

That crazy looking picture is all the dead skin, which was the stuff the little one was pulling out of the cast a few days ago!

The cast was offered to us as a memento but we said "no thanks"! People use them as flower pots to remind them of the fracture, we were told. We decided the video blogs would remind us plenty...

Learnt a lot about fractures today. Apparently, the entire body directs all regeneration efforts to that single broken location in the body. That explained the 3x faster nail growth in the right hand, the weird hair on the fingers, the dandruff looking extra skin growth, etc., which were all part of this regeneration.

One more month of exercising, and things should be back to normal.

This whole experience has taught the whole family many things at many levels...

In other news, now that I can look over my shoulder, drove to daughters school (2 blocks away) with left hand and picked her up this evening. Made tea this evening and buttoned my own pants!

Thank god for small favors...and more importantly, thank you all for your wishes and encouragement. Now it is time for me to make progress as fast as possible to make the family happy..

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