It has been months since I was awarded a patient, so I was happy to get the note another was awarded this week. (I say this very tongue in cheek, since I am always surprised) This one goes back about six years ago, when I was building a new way to route Amazon retail website customer requests to the correct backend fleet. I think this was four teams ago in my Amazon timeline, which has gotten pretty long in my 15 year tenure.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. -Mark Twain
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Amazon has this thing where when you submit a patient application and it is filed (so all the internal reviews are complete), you get a clear puzzle piece. Then down the road if the patient office accepts and issues the patient, you get a second puzzle piece with the patient number on it and this one is blue.
I finally got my first blue puzzle piece a couple years ago, I just got another one at the end of 2020. Given that I’m still working from home, I didn’t ‘pickup’ the blue puzzle piece until a couple weeks ago. (I had to go into the office to get something from my desk) But I did take a couple minutes to add the new piece to my ‘puzzle wall’. I know people that have so many of these that it fills their office windows.
I also just got e-mail this morning that another one of the batch I submitted several years ago was issued.
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I took the last two weeks of the year off, I only had to spend about 5 hours on Monday generating a report. (sigh)
Tonight I’m making cinnamon rolls for breakfast tomorrow, the only time I get to have them is when I make them myself. (dairy problem) So while waiting for them to bake, I have been cleaning out folders in gmail. I came across this link I sent myself and had to share. Well worth the 5 minutes to read it.
It is odd how the process works, the two patients which were issued back in July 2019 were apart five which were filed at the same time. You tend to file them in batches when they all come out of a new project development. I got notified another from that batch just got issued, 18 months later….
The next time I stop by the office (which I’ve seen twice in the last ten months), I’ll grab a picture of the cool blue puzzle pieces awards you get at Amazon when a patient is award. You get a clear puzzle piece when filing a patient.
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So I started writing this post months ago, for some reason never published it and have since had a second patent issued. What is odd/weird, the second patent was ‘filed’ at least a year before the first. I know a lot of people feel patents are out dated and this is doubly true for software patents, but the 10 year old in me reading books about Thomas Edison still feels it is cool.
During my four week post post-op follow up with the doc, I got a bunch of really good news. I got a schedule for slowing adding weight to my right leg (50% that week, then 25% a week) and he increased the brace so I could sit up to 80 degrees and then 90 degrees the following week. On week six, I was allowed to ditch the crutches and brace completely. March 29th was six weeks from my surgery, when I woke up that morning I ditched the brace and move the crutches to the corner.
I had already been slowly adding weight bearing to my right leg for the last couple weeks. My PT guy pointed out that 75% weight bearing, I could stand without the crutches, because I was only going to put 50% on my bad leg. When I realized this, I went pretty quickly to ‘walking’ with the crutches. I was only really using them when going up and down stairs.
Rosie was pretty amazed to see me walking around on Tuesday, she said that I was walking normally and couldn’t believe it. I get tired still if I go for any long distances and need to take stairs slow, but so far so good. Back to work next week.
Posted in Life | Comments Off on Week 6.5 Post Hamstring Surgery
For those that don’t know, almost a year ago (August, 2017) I tore most of the hamstring from where it attaches to the bone on my right side. The doctors call it a “Proximal Hamstring Primary Tear”, unlike most other hamstring tears, this won’t ‘heal’ on its own. Diagnosing the whole thing took a long time, because it isn’t a common thing and you can’t really tell without an MRI. So I tore it in August 2017, did the RICE thing for six months with it never really getting better and in December 2017 jump through the hoops to get an MRI.
The first orthopedic surgeon I saw was pretty amazed that I wasn’t in more pain considering how bad the tear was, but because I was functioning, he was strongly recommending just changing my lifestyle and dealing with it. He (correctly) pointed out that the recovery from the surgery to fix is one of the worst he knows. I noodled on this for several months and did the PT he recommended to make everything around it as strong as possible, but ultimately I realized I was living with a time bomb in me. I finally went and got a second opinion, but this time I went to a specialist for sports (the same doc that fixes the Seahawks actually) orthopedic surgery. The second opinion was basically the same as the first, it is a really bad tear and the surgery recovery sucks, but he said if I do the PT, there is no reason I can’t go back to Tae Kwon Do.
So there was more hoop jumping, finally was able to schedule the surgery for April 17th. That was almost two weeks ago now and everything went great. The doctor was happy with the outcome.
This was the third major surgery I’ve had in the last seven years, the previous two times were on my knee. In the past I bounced back quicker, with fewer issues, but every bad thing I’ve been told about the hamstring repair is turning out to be true. The first problem was my boding restarting from the anesthesia. I have never gotten constipated, but this time it was four days before I finally had a bowel movement. I was doing all the things you were suppose todo, but nothing was moving. Luckily once things got restarted, everything has been fine since.
So I knew that I’d be on crutches for six weeks after the surgery and there is no weight bearing for at least the first four weeks, then you are suppose to get limited weight bearing and ultimately walking without crutches. But the restricted movement thing is really annoying. I have to wear a brace for six weeks, but it isn’t to ‘support’ my leg, it is there to make sure I can’t bend more than 36 degrees at the waist. Basically they don’t want any stress put on the hamstring, which means I can’t sit up. That means eating is a real challenge, even sitting here on my laptop is a big issue. I got a special stand that hold my laptop up and I have pillows supporting me, but I’m only good to be in this position for about an hour.
Then there is the location of the actual surgery. There is no nice way to put this, it is in the middle of my right butt cheek. So even if I could sit up, I can’t sit in a chair because of this four inch hole that is slowly growing back together. The first week was really bad, but last two weeks ago the pain backed off a little bit. I stopped taking the narcotics about six days after the surgery during the day and switched to Tylenol, only taking a pill at night. Then around the time I went in for the 10 day post-op check up, I stopped taking them at night. I still can’t ‘sit’ in a normal chair, but the hole is becoming less and less of an issue.
I had the first post-op appointment on Thursday last week and the PA said I was healing very well. She put some jerry-strips on, but said don’t worry if they fall off the next time I shower.
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Last full day in Paris is almost over. And if you havne’t noticed a trend so far, things didn’t quite go as planned. I overslept a bit, since I was awaken around 4am by someone yelling in the street. He was at it for nearly an hour and it took me a while to get back sleep again. No clue what is was, I am guessing it was workmen doing something, since he wasn’t so much screaming, but yelling at people todo things.
So late start meant I missed breakfast in the hotel. This has been the safest place for me to eat by far in Paris. I tried a couple bites of a almond croissant Rosie brought back and just had my tea. We finally hit the street close to noon and headed towards the Eiffel Tower. It is a nice long walk from our hotel, close to an hour according to Google Maps. I haven’t mentioned this yet, but walking with Isaac and Rosie is a little difficult for me. They are both MUCH, MUCH slower than I. Which means I am either having to stop all the time to wait for them, or running into the back of them. So I suspect the walk would have taken longer than the estimated 60 minutes.
We took off towards the Tuileries Gardens and then hung a right onto the Champs Elysé. This was one of the planned places to visit, which I had figured wasn’t going to happen. But it was basically on our way and mostly in the right direction. Again, it was one of those situations where you could tell it was really pretty in the spring/summer, but today it was blah.
Champs Elysé
As you can see, the sky was pretty grey and it had just started switching from the misting to raining phase at this point. As we kept going, it switched from raining to dumping serious water on us, which was made worst by the wind starting to blow it sidewise. At this point, Rosie declared we had got close enough and were were heading back to the hotel.
This was the best view of the Eiffel Tower I got….
Eiffel Tower, sort of
At his point, we ducked into the closest Metro station to get out of the rain and figure out what todo. Initially Rosie was thinking of Uber, but we eventually just figured out the Metro system. The underground train system in Paris is called the Metro and it appears pretty decent. We hadn’t bothered using it all week, since most everything was closest enough to walk to that we wanted to see. (And we had gotten seriously lazy)
In London I had downloaded an app for my phone which would take the beginning and ending points and tell you which trains to use. I hadn’t planned on using the Metro in Paris, so I never looked for a similar app. But between GoogleMaps and Rosie decoding the signs, we figure out how to get back to our hotel.
Metro station in Paris
I was really hoping that once it stopped raining and we dried out, we’d make another trip on the Metro to see the Eiffel Tower, but it didn’t happen. Rosie and I ended up taking naps, while Isaac watched tv shows on his iPad. We finally got moving around 7pm and walked across the street to have noodles.Tomorrow we fly out in the morning back to the States. Since the trip home is naturally longer, I decided to add a layover in Dallas. We are on the plane from Paris to DFW about the same amount of time as the flight from Seattle to London, but need another three hours to make it the rest of the way home. I figured a 2.5 hour layover to get off the plane, stretch and move around was a good plan. It means we won’t get home until nearly 8PM on Friday, but I think it was a smart move.
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