where's the butter

Boo!

Let's see... Rehab rehab rehab, as well as an ER party. It's been a week of old and new since Montag.

Tuesday was Giger, bien sûr, followed by a pretty sad hour of short sit mat work. Subterranean blood pressure made it pretty unproductive, although by the end I was holding my own for the most part. "Oh noes," you might be thinking, "ur BP has ben teh grate fur so lonng! What givz?" Uhweleruh, when I do the Giger, we loosen up my abdominal binder (see "corset") because the combination of Giger position (inverted ladybug) and tight binder makes even my blood pressure skyrocket; after the Giger, though, we were sort of rushing to take care of a thing or two, and I forgot to have the abdobinder retightened... oops! My blood pressure is pretty dependent on that thing, so without it I am inevitably flirting with unconsciousness. Also, if you're thinking in lolspeak, you might want to get that checked out. Tuesday's session was rounded out with some lower extremity e-stim biking.

The rest of Tuesday was oh oh even better! Taste the sarcasm. I went to the ER directly after therapy because my blood was supposedly - that's the key word - dangerously thin. As in, if you know blood stuff, my INR from the last test was about 12 (again, supposedly). So, we went over and waited circa two hours to see someone at the ER. First thing they did, of course, was draw some more blood to check INR and Protime, the other clotting test, to see if my blood was still water before administering vitamin K, a hardcore blood thickener. It's a good thing they waited on the K, because tests showed PT/INR were right on - a little low, even. If I would've had the expected 500mg tablet of vit K, I think my entire body would have turned into one giant clot... Instead, the doc ruled that tests from Monday were erroneous and that I was a-ok. That's good - healthy is the way to be - but it was a six-hour adventure, and I want my Tuesday back.

On a related note, I predicted last time that my hands would be giant green blobs by now after so many pokes for so many blood tests... Wrong! The bruises are staying small and dark, so I'd say they're more like "bullet holes" than "hulk smash". btw, this paragraph is more gory than An Inconvenient Truth.

Moving on, Wednesday was a pretty cool therapy day. Post-Giger, we did some completely new prone (face-down) mat work. Describing this one should be interesting; prepare your imagination. It was a bit like army crawling in place. Most of my body was rolling on bolsters - think those rolling factory conveyor things used for sliding boxes along and such - and I was holding myself up on my elbows. Then for the first part, I used my shoulders and lats to push myself forward and back, rolling on the bolsters. For the second activity in this position, I shifted my weight left and right, trying to get all of my weight on one elbow so I could lift the other one and reach that free arm forward. Not surprisingly, this stuff was way hard and a bit uncomfortable. My back muscles are megaweak, so I always run out of steam on prone work right quick; similarly, they are not particularly willing to stretch quite as far as required for these exercises. However, hard and uncomfortable means effective and worthwhile. Bring it on.

Speaking of, after these prone exercises (and some supine ab crunches), I got to do the upper extremity e-stim bike! It's been a while because that part of the bike was broken, but I'm finally plowing through this biceps/triceps/traps nightmare, err, workout, again. I love this ridiculously grueling part of the bike. I coasted through the rest of the day just fine, but when I got up the next day my traps were so sore I could barely hold my head up. Yesss.

Friday's session was more textbook, coasting through Giger->weights->leg bike. Not even a trip to the ER!

Hmm, in non-therapeutic news, my typing wrist/hand/finger splint is broken as of about halfway through this post, so updates might be a tad more brief for a little while. That's probably a good thing anyway. Otherwise, not much going on. It's snowing. Brrr.

Ok, plenty. As Chop Chop Master Onion might say, "that's it for today!"