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Hand surgery: before & after

First of all, no before photo in this post… I couldn’t capture the bump on the back of my left hand well for a before photo. The after photo is completely bandaged, so nothing gruesome.

Before

Back in October, before I went to Montreal, my hand started hurting… just a little… and I noticed a bump just before the wrist. It disappeared during that trip, then returned in full force after Dorkstock, to the point where I headed to Urgent Care (5 minutes away) right after work one day. They quickly diagnosed it as a ganglion cyst and referred me to Orthopedics.

“But Frances,” I can almost hear you say, “that was 4 months ago. Why are you just having surgery now?”

The answer is there’s a process to follow before surgery. First we tried anti-inflammatory medication, and when that didn’t eliminate the cyst (though it did reduce the pain), the doctor drained it. Well, tried to… the cyst wasn’t particularly cooperative with the initial needle or the larger one she used next, as neither one managed to puncture the cyst to remove content. Despite that, the bump and related pain lessened for a bit, and she instructed me to give it about 6 weeks and reach out to a colleague who specializes in hands and wrists if it returned. I scheduled that appointment immediately after Capricon, had a 5 -minute appointment with the doctor to confirm that I wanted to move forward with surgery, and scheduled it for the next available date, which was a month out at the time.

The day before, the office called to give me a specific appointment time mid-afternoon, and reviewed the things I should avoid going into that day: alcohol, lotions, jewelry are the primary ones that come to mind. Arrival time was an hour before surgery time.

Once there, it was a lot of waiting time. Wait to check in, wait briefly in the waiting room, then wait for most of an hour in my pre-op room until the doctor came by to inject something numbing into my hand. Once that had time to settle, I took a luxurious wheelchair ride to the operating room, where the view of my hand was completely blocked by a draped sheet. I could feel poking and prodding happening, but no pain, and then my hand was bandaged up.

After

After the procedure, I was wheeled back to my pre-op room, offered a snack, and told I could change back into my clothes once I was sure I was stable. At that point, my fingertips weren’t numb anymore, but the rest of my hand still was, including the knuckles and base of my fingers. It’s a weird sensation that lasted for hours; that area was still numb when I went to bed several hours later – and partially numb in the middle of the night.

By early morning, none of that numbness remained, though any pain is mostly limited to movement. Part of my release instructions are to move my fingers frequently, so I’ve experimented with different movements to see what’s comfortable. For example, typing sitting down is a bad angle for my wrist, but standing up seems to be OK. I’m also applying ice packs regularly and found a position at my work desk for keeping that hand elevated most of the time (including with an ice pack). The bandages stayed on for two days (coming off just before this post is live), and I have a follow-up appointment in just over a week to make sure it’s healing well.

In terms of other restrictions, well, the doctor said to listen to the hand… if something hurts, I’m probably not ready to do it yet.

The home repair project is done!

Well, this home repair project at least. As any homeowner can tell you, there will always be another one. (The kitchen faucet, for example. Or the couple lingering spots of green paint outside). But the work for this particular project resulting from the hailstorm and covered by the insurance finished with the garage door installation earlier this week.

An updated photo of the house, now with a white garage door and trim instead of brown.

Let me just say… damn, it looks good. I am immensely grateful to C&N Construction for doing the work and Allstate Insurance for covering the repairs. (I was going to say funding, but technically I suppose it’s funded by all of us customers paying our insurance bills.) Both companies worked together to make this a fairly painless process for their mutual customer.

What an ex-siding week!

Sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun. As I mentioned before, because of a hailstorm last spring, our house needed a new roof, siding, and garage door. As you may have guessed from the title, the siding work happened this week.

It wasn’t without problems – apparently it’s fairly common for siding work to mess up the fiber connection to the house, so my ISP was out here yesterday, starting to repair our internet connection as the siding team was wrapping up. And my mailbox, along with the neighbor’s, now have new posts because they got knocked over around lunch yesterday.

The front and side of a beige house with brown gutters.

Here’s what the house looked like on Monday, with beige siding and brown gutters.

The front and side of the same house, three days later, now blue with white gutters, matching the white window frames.

And here’s what the house looks like now, with blue siding, white gutters, and a white number plate with gold number replacing the old (and smaller) black numbers. At some point soon, the garage door will be replaced with a white one for a fairly uniform look.

Primaries matter too.

As we come upon Super Tuesday and other primary dates, I thought it was important to mention that voting in primaries matters as much as voting in the general elections. Like with the general elections, there are local races that are probably not getting much press that you should absolutely pay attention to.

Let’s start at the top. If you use Ballotpedia to create a sample ballot based on your voting address, you should see the federal elections (in my case, Presidential and Congressional district candidates) and state races (Senate and House of Representatives). I’m (not surprisingly) voting in the Democratic Party primary, so without Ballotpedia, I wouldn’t have realized that our incumbent state representative has no primary candidates from other parties. When we bought this house in 2016, I noticed in that general election that several positions only had Republican candidates, so this is definitely a shift. If there’s one thing you can give the previous President credit for, it was galvanizing people to run for office at all levels because of how offensive he was (well, is).

And that’s where Ballotpedia stops for me. It says there are 4 candidate races on my ballot, so I have to research the county and township races somewhere else. Most of the primary candidates at this level are both incumbents and running unopposed, leaving only one race I feel I should research: the county recorder. Since the local races are the ones that will have a more direct impact on me – they influence property taxes, school and library boards, and such (though I still don’t know why county coroner is an elected position) – I’ll take the time to look up these two candidates before completing my mail-in ballot.

Capricon 44 (February 2024)

We attended Capricon last weekend, building a box fort (again!), hanging out with friends, and attending and/or participating in various panels. I’ve written about Capricon multiple times over the years, as it’s by far my favorite science fiction convention. Smaller conventions – say under a couple thousand people – give you plenty of opportunity to connect with your friends and random encounters with other people, including making new friends.

I’ve mentioned the parties a lot the last couple years, since we started running The Box Fort party at Capricon. While those fill my late night hours (and my nights are definitely later than normal when I’m at conventions), there are a lot of options during the day as well. There are panels on a wide variety of geeky subjects, including a writer’s track for existing and aspiring authors. There’s a gaming room with an extensive library – it was open Thursday evening, then re-opened Friday morning and stayed open until Sunday afternoon. The filk track had both a variety of scheduled events and open jam times.

There were several shopping opportunities between the dealer’s hall, art show (I sold some crocheted items), and author signings that were located just outside the dealer’s hall. Any art show items that receive three or more bids end up at the art auction; this year that included a good selection of board games from our friend Marinda’s collection, donated to support the convention’s designated charity for the year.

Alas, at least one event on the calendar was cancelled because of the weather. The annual “Snow Goons!” (a tribute to Calvin & Hobbes) outing relies on actual snow; last weekend was surprisingly warm. Regardless, a convention like this is a great opportunity to let your geek flag fly, with whatever fandoms you’re inclined to include on that flag.

Step one: a new roof

As I recently mentioned, a hailstorm last spring did considerable damage to our house. By the time I wrote that post, I had signed paperwork with C&N Construction to handle the work and provided them with a chunk of insurance money. (The insurance process involves providing part of the money in advance, and some only when they receive receipts proving that you actually did the repairs and spent the money you’re asking for above the initial payment.) The first step in the work – after the decision-making and signatures, of course – is the roof replacement.

Then it snowed, a fairly significant amount over the course of a week – we reached the 9-inch mark on the snow gauge in the front lawn. And then the temperature dropped, including a couple days where the wind chill was around negative thirty. Needless to say, those weather conditions are not conducive to working on a roof.

The layers under the new shingles on our roof

This week, after most of the snow had melted, the construction company reached out to schedule our installation day. Since our neighbor just had their roof replaced last month – by the same company, for the same hailstorm reason – I had a fairly good idea what the process would be like. The day before installation, they dropped off supplies onto our driveway in two waves: the first delivery was the shingles, and the second an assortment of other large items in their packaging. Early on the morning of, a trailer was backed into the driveway to serve as a dumpster, and around 7am, the team arrived to begin work.

Except for a brief lunch break, they worked all day, moving any obstacles (like the composter and solar path lights), laying tarp around the edges of the house to catch refuse flung from the roof, then tearing off the old roof before taking new roofing supplies up. (The entire process was loud, Zuko hid most of the day.) They had a fancy ladder with a lift attached to raise the heavy supplies to the roof. They finished as it was getting dark, so the photo of the finished roof is from the next (quite sunny) day.

Step two, I believe, will be the siding.

Warm cuddles on cold mornings

Early morning is my ideal workout time, but I’ve been having trouble getting out of bed most days, largely because one or more cats are still on the bed. They used to make getting up easier – as soon as I was awake, the cats would run around the room demanding breakfast. That has changed in the last couple years, particularly with Arwen who likes curling up just under the covers, resting on my arm. And she’s staying there even after I wake up.

It’s not just her though. Diane is usually by my waist at that point, sometimes still curled up with June, and Zuko is usually by my feet. The other morning, after I woke up and was reading news updates, Diane got out of bed, walked to the other end of the house to deposit a hairball… and then came back to bed! (It wasn’t on the bed or on carpet, so I’m not complaining.) Even June, our most prolific meal howler, on occasion climbs back onto the bed instead. Not for long, mind you, but she does.

My crack-of-dawn workouts are suffering as a result, but damn, they’re cute.

Take the week off, says Zuko

It’s been a week here. You’d think I’d get ahead on the blog with a three-day weekend, but it was painfully cold all weekend (wind chills down to the negative thirties Fahrenheit) and there was a lot to do, including taking June and Diane to their annual checkups. So enjoy a cute photo of Zuko.

Roofing and gutters and siding, oh my.

While we were traveling in England in April, a major hailstorm struck our neighborhood. Our neighbor took photos of hail next to a golf ball for size comparison. Though we missed the storm, I knew what would follow… stormchasers, the collection of construction and roofing companies knocking on the door (usually during work) or leaving flyers offering a free inspection, looking to claim insurance money for the repairs after every wind- or hailstorm. Some of them are recognizable names, some aren’t… and most of them are pushy. I turned them all down, even though I have a dent on my car’s roof showing that it was a significant storm.

That is, until our neighbor had their roof inspected and discovered he needed a replacement roof. Yikes. And they have trees protecting some of their roof; ours is exposed. Knowing he’s diligent about such things, I still researched the company he was working with and discovered overall good reviews and an excellent rating with the Better Business Bureau. (Assuming everything goes well, I will share the name of the company in a later post.) I reached out to the company and scheduled an inspection.

Dents from hail on my beige siding marked with light green chalk

Oh boy… yes, there was damage. This is our siding – marked up with chalk during the follow-up inspection with the claims adjuster from our insurance company. Each chalk mark is highlighting an indent on the siding.

Dents from hail on metal roof vent marked with yellow chalk

And then there’s the roof. I didn’t get good photos of the chalk mark all over the roof – the insurance found hail damage everywhere except over the garage (the side leaning away from the storm’s direction). This photo is one of the vents – soft metal sticking out of the roof, now with multiple dents on it. In between the roof and siding, of course, are the gutters, which were one of the first upgrades when we bought the house. They’re harder to photograph, even when marked up with chalk.

And, last but certainly not least, the garage door. That was fairly new – the old one allowed light and air through underneath, so we had a new one installed in 2021. The new one was a massive improvement both on insulation and privacy – the old door had windows about chest height, allowing anyone passing by to see into the garage. The replacement door has higher windows, still allowing light in, but only allowing tall people right by the house to peer inside. I’m a bit a sad that we have to replace it, but the claims adjuster pointed out that if we don’t, any damage to it by a future storm would probably not be covered. I am grateful for having selected a reputable insurance company (Allstate, if you’re wondering) and for how seamlessly the construction company seems to work with them. Outside photos – probably some before and after shots – will appear in a separate post once the work is in progress or done.

Well, shit… or medical procedures for the aging.

As I age, my doctor has begun throwing about terms like colonoscopy and shingles vaccine. The colonoscopy discussion started a couple years ago, before the recommended age for them was lowered, and we agreed I’d do take home tests until I hit the half century mark. The take home alternates to colonoscopies have, I’m sure, more formal names, but are commonly referred to as “shit kits.” I would, my doctor informed me, be sending a sample bowel movement to a laboratory. It’s only getting more detailed from here, so feel free to quit and come back next week for less stinky content.

I was surprised at how small the package was the first time I brought one of the kits home. As it turns out, that particular kit style only wants a small sample… but across multiple days. They provided some sturdy paper to place under yourself (held in place by the toilet seat), wooden sticks to scrape off a sample, and three foldable sample cards which get folded back to closed after you let the sample dry. Ewww, right? An important note is that you need to write your personal information and date on the outside of each card, preferably before adding the sample. Once all three samples have been collected and dried, you drop them into the provided plastic envelope, seal it, slap a stamp on it, and put it with the outgoing mail.

An open box with an open plastic bag inside containing a couple sealed containers with liquid, a sealed empty container, and a toilet seat insert.

This year’s kit is fancier, a bit closer to what I originally expected – and the test results are supposed to be good for three years. It’s shipped from the testing company and the same box is used to return the sample. There’s a zipped bag inside the box, along with a toilet seat insert, a sealed container for the sample (that fits into the seat insert), a test tube with some liquid in it, and another container with liquid that will be added to the sample. Plus two instruction books: the big one, which includes step-by-step instructions with illustrations (in English & Spanish) and the little one that tells you how to ship the kit back.

The basic process is similar to the previous years: poop, catch it, package it up. Despite the bigger packaging, it’s actually simpler because it’s a single day’s sample and it gets sealed up immediately instead of dried. The little test tube has a stick that comes out and gets a small sample before the other container of liquid gets poured into the main container, and the instructions are clear as to the order everything needs to happen in. Once re-bundled, the company provides a link to schedule the package pick-up, so you don’t even need to leave your house.

If you’re approaching an appropriate age, consider asking your doctor about a take home kit to check for colon cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, there’s been an increase in colon cancer rates, particularly in younger adults, so every opportunity you have for early detection is a good idea.