jacques chiractober review

Hey all! It's been so long, there is no way I can put together an all-inclusive update to bring you completely up to speed. Here are some randomized entertaining parts. If I skip anything you want to know, either ask in the comments or make it up.

Apart from the distributed time at home, phys therapy is going quite well. The short breaks actually appear to have helped my body rest and rebuild even stronger, so it seems. I've improved across the board. More weight during lifting. Average Giger revs have marginally increased, barring days where dysreflexia cuts time short. Neck strength is getting better for sitting balance. Same with arms. And my traps are ridiculous. Apparently my trunk muscles are getting a bit stronger, too: sometimes those conniving therapists of mine will leave me sitting upright under my own power - no arms, even - without telling me. Sneaky people they are.

Manual chair propulsion (with the power assist wheels) is getting waaay easier with practice. Back in the days of warmer weather, we went on a few trips around the DMC campus, finding all of the non-ADA-compliant ramps to various buildings and trying to take them on. We've been in the up and down world of "the tunnels" a bunch, too. I've taken the manuchair home overnight a few times as well to test out the skilz on relatively boring (to you) daily use stuff. Let's rock it already!

(For those familiar with the DMC underground system, miercoles I did a few laps for warmup, then went from the CSCIR all the way down to the end of the downhill hot part with the pipes and back, then the other direction to the other end elevators, up to the ground floor, and through the hospitals past Wendy's. And back.)

Further, an update on the manual chair acquisition story: schooled. Last time I checked in with you guys, I needed to demonstrate sufficient incline/decline/propulsion/stability/everything skills in order to get the doc's Rx approval, necessary to ask for stuff to be covered under insurance. Let's just say that has been done, and then some. QED.

On the not-so-optimistic end, there are a few sad notes. First of all, Katie's gone! My awesome main therapist has been transferred temporarily. Positive: I still have the same rockin' trainer, and my replacement PT is also pretty much sweetness. Also a bummer, an assortment of the most inspirational people on the floor either left recently or about to leave. Boo. Next on the ugh list, insurance is about to give up (already has, really), so I don't think I get to be here much longer. Continuing, I had another DXA last week, and it confirmed that my bone density is indeed terrible. Eh, I don't want to talk about negative stuff anymore.

Finally, I spent today with my hands in an electrified bucket of water. I heart neurology.

Beyond therapy, umm, it's cold here! Detroit weather is not cool. Er, I guess it's extremely cool, and that's the problem. Fortunately, it's not far from the room to the RIM. So far, I've been able trick myself, too. I have quite vivid memories of several occasions at school when it was way below freezing, there was heavy sleet/snow/wind, and I was trapped outside my building because the accessible door was either frozen shut or just plain broken... So before I go outside here I just think of those times, and then it doesn't seem so bad out. This has a second benefit of getting me pretty fired up, and anger improves therapy performance! Ha ha, you know who you are.

Otherwise, I severely hacked my phone, and as a "computer guy" who does not fear the technical aspects, it is delicious. On a related topic, I'm trying to figure out some good certifications to pick up in order to improve my prospects in the computing job world. A+ and similars are pretty much out, since I can't physically manipulate hardware very well. Once upon a time, someone recommended getting into WWAN stuff. I like *nix/platform-agnostic projects, too, and I'm all about the educational sect. Any suggestions?

Ok, drugs say I should probably stop talking. I would like to say, though, thanks to everyone for diligently checking for updates all this time that I've been MIA. I'm sorry to have abandoned you; you're the ones that matter, after all. Continue being amazing, and I'll do my best to keep up.

children fear and critics rage

29 September 2008. Majestic Theatre. Detroit. Buckethead, featuring That 1 Guy. Photos courtesy of the mom and my old Moto Q, usually without zoom because we were that close. Click the pictures to see them full size, of course. Caption comes after photo.

"Let's begin." --Stick Pit
-----


My brave, brave front row cohort for the evening.



Opener: That 1 Guy. Awesome, impressive, bizarre. He plays a homemade concoction - two one-string "basses" made out of metal pipe and connected by a bunch of metal pipe joints - and a little drum kit thing. Lots of buttons all around. Here he's using a classical upright bass bow.

We actually met this dude before the show. We were inside getting out of the rain, and someone asked me, "you know who the opener is?" I said, "yeah, I think it's 'That 1 Guy'..." And out of nowhere the Guy himself walks by and says, "hey, that's me! Hope you like it!" Crazy.



Upright slap bass technique, combined with words from BizarroLyricLand. (example: while improvving a bit, he rhymed "biotch" with "iotch". Delicious.)


More upright slap style - here you can sort of see both necks on the bass contraption. (Technically a true double bass? Har har, music nerds...)



Goofy singing face #1 of many.



Let's play with a drumstick. Whamola, anyone?



The tiny drum weaponry.



Uh oh...


For triangulation purposes, to demonstrate how close we were. Compare with other head-on and his-left-side photos. Also, he's showing off his guitar strap antics. The big metal thing on the left is That 1 Guy's instrument. Mr. Striped Shirt was actually next to us, not in front.


Classic. Gorgeous. Creepy.


Shred shred shred shred wail.


Mmm, elastic guitar strap



More blurry, but a better demo of what he does quite a bit. In case you haven't gathered yet, his git strap is stretchy; he likes to push the thing away from his body to get weird bends/distortion while still playing notes with his fret (left) hand. Buckethead? Weird guitar noises? Go fig. BTW, blurry as it is, this is probably my favorite photo from the collection - he's shoving his guitar in my face, after all.


Here he hides behind the speaker stack stage right, poking his head out to stare at the crowd. (Another good triangulation photo, since he's really offstage at this point.)


Slap pop slap pop


Posefest.


Magic killswitch button!


Reminds me of some other slap/popper I know...



Nunchaku!


Next he picks up a giant rubber chicken and invests a solid minute or two walking it all the way across the stage. Yesss.



Robot dance also mandatory

He's not too bad at it, either.

Again, bad blur obfuscating guitar insanity. By now you may have also noticed that he never looks at what he's playing. This means he spent a lot of time sharing stares with all of us up front.


tappy tap, shreddy shred


Magic button, even more up close!


Another standard "huh?" mask break. Sadly, I recognize that mask from another concert...


Why pick when you can 8-finger tap?


The original robot wail maneuver.


Eight fingers again. His hands are huge.


Could it be merely six digits?


That 1 Guy returns for some jam time.


Simultaneous Bucket shred and T1G thump/wallop/???


Turn, pose!


PS he's pretty good.


To close, something dreamlike: so about 2/3 of the way through Buckethead's set, he picks up some unidentifiable object from on top of his equipment and starts playing some bizarro Star Wars-like riffs/noises, using the object as a guitar pick of sorts. This goes on for about a minute. Then he stops, walks up to the front of the stage, crouches down, pushes everyone's grabby hands away... And directly hands me a little R2-D2 action figure, pictured - the thing he had just been playing with. I reiterate: Buckethead stopped the show to single me out and hand me something. Wow. :-D

(Still only the second-best concert ever, Tim)

choose your time zone wisely

happy birthday, jarmstro,

smartest human I know!

you should read his blog and leave best wishes...
(because it's waaay more interesting than mine)

sugoi, ne? desu yo.

(it's the 16th, btw, but he's in Japan, so he really lives in the future for most of us)

cryptically speaking...

he's coming



(jo knows)

...

brotherrr
clone
DJ
cohort
ally
accomplice
idol

best friend

gone

LimaFest 9/'08

So... Last weekend Dr. Lima was here in Detroit, I think mostly to give a presentation on research, methods, etc. Let's review.

If you haven't been following über-closely, Dr. (Carlos) Lima is the front man for a band of neurologists in Portugal who perform a pretty complicated adult (non-embryonic) stem cell transplant for treatment of spinal cord injury (details: 'net search for "OMA" or "olfactory mucosal autograft", or read some of my older posts). Noncoincidentally, this is the operation I had 11 April 2008. Several of his patients are/have been living on the same floor of the I-House where I am, doing similar hardcore PT, and having awesome results. Beyond those of us at RIM, his patients are all over in Detroit - including even the one other wheeling dude at the Death Cab concert! I don't remember exactly how many people have had the surgery from around the world so far, something like 150-175 or so.

Anyway, I digress. Dr. Lima was here the whole weekend; Friday night a few of us went to have calamari 'n' wine and just spend time with him and some of the people from where he was presenting. Yum, squid! Not as good (or bizarre) as takoyaki, of course, but still quality cephalopod cuisine.

Then Saturday afternoon we went out of Detroit Proper to the WtLtSCIR facility to attend the seminar and schmooze more. Dr. Lima talked about his surgery and recent advances a little, and threw in a smidge about other stem cell surgeries, but mostly discussed the benefits of full weight bearing and braceless training in PT for SCI patients, particularly post-operation. Oversimplified summary: (1) the surgery yields results, (2) don't use leg braces. This may not sound like the most fascinating of lectures to non-SCI folks, but I promise, it was great. Dr. Lima is an information machine, and even though his op quite clearly speaks for itself, his style makes it energetic/riveting/xlnt.

Moving on, the next speaker, a superpowered lab research master, talked about the aforementioned surgery's effects in rats - scientists heart rats, after all. O-Summary: they used to think the procedure didn't work well enough in non-humans... But look! It works with rats, too. Come on, FDA, approve this stuff already!

To round out the PowerPoint party, we went through the slides from an SCI doctor who couldn't attend (appendicitis, anyone?), annotated on the fly by some therapist surrogates. O-Summary: (1) rehab is better when it's holistic, and (2) Dr. Lima is right.

Okay, there ya go; that's about it for a quasi-objective recap. On the more subjective end, the handful of us from therapy were thoroughly excited to talk to Dr. Lima, and, well, show off... It's incredible to see what people can do that simply wasn't going to happen before that trip to Lisbon. I don't think it's appro for me to share many details about other rehabbers, but let's just say they can do some pretty sweet stuff.

Ah, did I mention that I spent the whole weekend pushing myself around in a manual chair? *evil grin*

this WiR

Hey all! A delicious week in review. Be excited.

To start, I'm still on hold or whatever for OT, courtesy of red tape, so nothing official to report on that front. I've been doing wrist/hand e-stim, playing with my tennis balls and baseball, and rocking all sorts of air guitar (like right now), though, so I'm not slacking off too much. Further, methinks the new phone counts as pretty intense dexterity practice...

Phys therapy has been busy! Let's see...

Friday's session was serendipitously cool, not even counting the slightly secret part. I went over an hour early to get in some leg zap bike time, as usual, but, also as is common, all of the bikes were occupied. So there I was, an hour early (me? early? I know) with nothing to do. Hmmm. Well, (1) I'm always up for some manual chair practice, (2) the chair I've been tooling around in was set up and begging for some action, and (3) doing laps on the track is benign enough of an activity that dad could monitor me sans therapist, so I asked my substitute trainer for the day (the 'cenzo) if I could go for it. But (4) he was done with lunch, and (5) was also bored, so he suggested we get started early and go for a trip! Rock, I said, so we went out to push around the medical center campus, testing out my control of the power-assist wheels on inclines/declines and bumpy sidewalks and such. It was fantastic. I can go pretty much anywhere, up and down and all around, with those wheels. Heart. Get me out of this lazy power chair.

After cruising around like that for about 2h, we returned to do the Giger, followed by the now-open leg e-stim bike. Grand. It should be noted that, despite all the ups and downs and how far we went in the power-assisted manual, my arms were neither sore nor tired. It's still a ton of work, but not quite as gruesome and futile as trying to do the same trip with the completely manual chair. Hrrrg!

Okay, that was Friday's crazy four-hour session. Mon/Tues/Wed's times were a bit more standard - Giger, then either weights or manupropel, then fighting with the broken upper-extremity e-stim bike. Wednesday we completely avoided the uppers bike in favor of the arm cycle part of the MOTOmed. The MOTOmed machine is yet another arm and/or leg ergometer that does not include FES assistance. Instead, I pedal as usual, as much on my own as possible; then it either provides resistance or passive motor assistance, depending on [details omitted] my speed relative to a preset speed goal [mostly]. In other words, first I set a speed, something like 40rpm or so. Then I pedal (I was doing it with my arms). If I went much faster than 40, it increased resistance to make it more difficult and slow me down. If I dropped a lot lower than 40, it would either decrease resistance or move the pedals for me, letting me have a short break without stopping the movement. If I were doing my legs, then, since I can't pedal, it would do all the work for me, passively running my legs through the motions. This isn't as great as the active exercise provided by coordinated electrical stimulation, but it's still important, as repetitive motion is key to retraining my body how to do stuff. Anyway, this machine was holy cow hard, but I could tell that my triceps were working with a fair amount of strength. That's a, umm, huge discovery.

Today? Mammoth sleep session. I'd be better off if I were smart enough to go to bed 3h earlier on nights before therapy. Diurnalism 101: Fail.

I suppose that's about all for now. I haven't even mentioned that Dr. Lima was here over the weekend - that deserves its own post. Coming soon. Word out, skillets de la maison.