The pressing question for me at the moment is: If I'm doing so well, why is five pounds so heavy? I have a couple of light handweights that I've pulled out of mothballs to do some easy exercising with. The catch is, they aren't so light. What I used to be able to throw around with impunity I now can't even do ten legal curls with. I knew I'd had a fair amount of muscle wasting, but this is ridiculous. It's time to start getting serious about building myself back up. There's still a lot I can't do yet, since I'm forbidden to lift anything that weighs more than 15 pounds for a few months yet. Still, I don't see that as a major problem, since I'm currently having trouble with a third of that amount.
The level of my anti-rejection drug has been lowered slightly, from 10 mgs twice a day to 9 mgs twice a day. I don't know if the change is significant enough to make any kind of impact on the intention tremors I've been getting, but at least we're moving in the right direction now. I learned today that the headaches and dry cough I've been troubled with the past week may well be due to the anti-rejection drug as well. Ironic how something so good for me is so bad for me.
My morning glory vines are now about a third of the way up the fencing, and started to bloom yesterday. Yesterday I had one magenta colored flower, and today one blue and two purple flowers. There were buds aplenty on the vines today, so with any luck I'll get a decent picture of the vines tomorrow to show off in an entry. I'll also need to post pictures of the gardens my sisters planted for me while I was in the hospital. Great bursts of color and mayhem predominate, just as I'd hoped to plant myself.
People are already starting to talk about when I go back to work. To be honest, I have no intention of going back to work this summer, and if I can put it off until the end of November I'll do so. I think my new liver and I are going to need a nice, long honeymoon to get acquainted. I want this "marriage" to work, so I'm taking all the time I can legally get. Maybe I'll change my tune when I start feeling really good, and perhaps start getting bored, but then again, I got no vacation this year at all (twelve day hospital stays do not count) so this will be my only chance to take one.
The logistics of actually getting away for a weekend right now are formidible. I'd give a great deal to get away to somewhere ... anywhere ... for a long weekend, but between the drugs and having to stay close to my hospital and my current lack of stamina, I have no idea what I could manage. It's probably too early to be thinking about that anyhow, but then again, it's probably a good sign that I am thinking about it.
Meanwhile, I have started on one of the handful of projects I had set aside in anticipation of being stuck home in recuperation mode. My father left a legacy of several hundred letters written home to his parents and friends during World War II, as well as keepsakes such as paper money and coins from the war era from the Pacific theatre, and a treasure trove of photographs. I am in the process of transcribing, scanning, and building a site to chronicle those items. The earliest of them was sixty years old this June, the sixtieth anniversary of my father's graduation from college. It's strange to hold these items in my hand, knowing that my father (who could never have been justly accused of being a sentimentalist) saved them for all those decades until he died. At the same time, I'm finding it a good way to center myself, and reconnect with a man dead for thirteen years.
I often wonder what he would have made of this whole liver transplant thing.