Why I Have Been Quiet Lately

It is all about my broken shoulder, and I also discuss my plans for the future.

I am beginning to hear from people who are concerned about me, as I have been uncharacteristically silent. I appreciate the concern.

The reason for my silence is that recovering from my broken shoulder has been difficult. I am in pain 24/7, often agonizing, and I have not slept normally for nearly a month.

I asked the medical assistant on the night of my injury what the worst day would be, and she replied with Day Two. Then I read somewhere that the first week would be the worst, and then it would get better. My wife’s sister broke her shoulder a few years ago, and she laughed at my optimistic prognosis, that I would be out of the woods in a week or so. She was on opioid painkillers for a month. That will likely be my fate, but the medical profession has gone overboard in reaction to the opioid scandals. Now, they only give patients three days’ worth, and the patients have to keep begging for more. I have been stretching mine out to six days, and my latest prescription will run out on Friday. I am on six different kinds of painkillers right now, but the opioid is the one that packs the punch. I hope to not have to go begging for more opioid painkillers this weekend, but we’ll see. I have improved in ways, but I am often in as much pain as I was on the first day.

I saw a specialist last week, and he said that my break is clean and should heal normally. My arm will be in a sling for two more weeks, but full recovery is six months from the date of injury, which will include lots of physical therapy. Before I broke my shoulder, I had already scheduled medical tests, which were my first since 2009. I have seen nearly as many doctors in the past month as I’ve seen in the rest of my lifetime combined. I had the tests at my wife’s insistence, and the results are about what I expected. I have nothing that cannot be remedied by losing 20 pounds and keeping it off. That has been my goal for years, maybe this ordeal will inspire me to finally tread the straight and narrow, and it is all about diet.

I have promised my wife that I will no longer hike by myself, except for the local mountains, and I will no longer talk while going downhill, which is always when I’ve injured myself. I have had several bad spills while going downhill over the past generation, but this was by far the worst. My life has been on hold since the accident and I don’t want an experience like this again. In this past month, my mortality has been obvious, as I can clearly see my life’s end coming. I am going to age as gracefully as I can, but I have to be much more careful.

Eight days ago, I began a post that will be fairly ambitious, but I have not had the energy or headspace to complete it. This morning, I decided to do a short post on a different subject, and I only got two paragraphs into it. I am on opioids right now, which is the only way that I could have done this post.

Household chores came to a halt, and I have a lot of catching up to do when I get better. My guess is that in about two weeks, I will be able to write fairly normally again. On a positive note, voice recognition might become an integral part of my writing efforts. During this ordeal, I made my final migration to my new computer, as Microsoft forced me into upgrading from my 15-year-old computer. So my tools have improved.

The video interview that I did last summer is the first time that I have ever been on video. I had never seen myself talking like that before. Some of my fidgeting was because it was 86 degrees in my office – Thank you, Global Warming. I was surprised to see how well I came across. I can do this. When I saw Dennis Lee last month, he said the same thing. I think that my writing is more important than anything that I could say, but I can see a place for speaking in my work. I really want to have a robust discussion of my work. I would love to be able to have a discussion of every chapter of my book-preview essay. That essay is the essence of my work today, and I think that a discussion of it could be very helpful for the people that I seek. But I do not know of anybody on Earth who can have that conversation with me. I do not expect anybody to know the material as well as I do, but the people that I seek need to become familiar with the ideas in that essay. I think that a discussion can help make the material more accessible, and some pals have agreed with me. I have been trying to make my work as easy to digest as possible. So, this may be a future direction that my work will take. Maybe I can tag-team the chapters with various scholars.