St Croix River Road Ramblings

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Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Knee Weeak after Surgery

Just past a week since I had the knee replaced. The cut is healing fine; things seem to be coming along except the continuous dull pain that stays with me. Having fooled around with Tylenol and Tramadol, I find myself resorting to the oxycodone when it gets too bad.
Mostly I do a few sets of knee bends and straightens several times a day to try and keep it bending, otherwise mostly just try to distract myself with the computer, my TV and ROKU internet access or Netflix online. Very boring, but as everything is healing I just have to patiently wait it out.
Margo, taking care of her father after bypass a few weeks ago, has decided to stay there until April. He is coming along good, but is worried about being on his own yet.
Today's article in the Milwaukee Journal said that WI maple syrup producers were having their worst year in memory. In the article, Steve Anderson, of Cumberland, a syrup buyer and bottler, said that those with vacuum pipelines are doing much better than those with buckets. My nephew, Bryce, tapped some of our maples and in spite of the warm weather has been getting some sap and cooking some syrup.
Daffodils were blooming next to a house in Pine Island when we drove through yesterday. Tulips leaves were 3-4 inches tall. Last night's heavy rain here is starting to turn the lawn green.
My biggest problem is losing one of the several remote controls for the TV and other electronics down in the bottom of the recliner. I think I will tie them to strings hanging down from the ceiling near the chair! It is hard to control my small world without the remotes.
A week from Thursday I have the staples out of the knee and my first check on the progress. Before that, Monday, I have the first check after 7 weeks on the CPAP machine.
The breathing machine has a camera memory type chip that records everything each night--details of each breath and so on. The doctor will load in the data into his computer and study the results and decide if we need to reset any of the machine parameters. I am not supposed to know how to do this (the secret is holding two buttons down for 10 seconds to go into "doctor mode" where you can change anything.) After 3 weeks, I upped the pressure from 7 to 7.5 and then a couple of weeks later to 8 to try to drop the number of stop breathing episodes. It has worked, but the doc will probably give me a hard time for messing with the prescribed numbers he set orignally.
Chuck and Carol of Bone Lake WI stopped by with lunch for us today. They drove the 3.5 hours down here for a visit. It was nice to visit. They told us that Eiler Ravnholt's brother Otto passed away on his way back to Nevada from his brother's funeral up here. He spoke at the funeral in West Denmark just days earlier.