Here are the little things, little things that seem like huge things, that I’ve pulled off in the last few days, with my “affected arm”:

• Turned a door knob.
• Carried a coffee cup from the kitchen to the dining room.
• Did a little typing, on my laptop keyboard.
• Tied my own shoes.
• Put the duvet inside the freshly-laundered duvet cover. 

I still can’t quite brush my teeth, or eat, with my right hand, but I’m getting tantalizingly close.

Range of motion progress is take a screenshot difficult to judge, day by day, because it’s happening so slowly. But it does seem to be happening. 

My friend Dave’s exhortation to do the physio has been echoed by every personal tale of elbow injury rehab I’ve read, so I’m doing the physio, religiously, three times a day, as prescribed.

I’ve done a lot of physiotherapy in my day, most of it related to typing injuries: I typed professionally for more than 40 years, often, especially at the beginning, in ergonomically-compromised positions.

I don’t have a good track record of translating verbal instructions into physical actions, so having a physiotherapist who will give clear demonstrations, and then leave me with clear written instructions, always results in better outcomes.

Back in the day, physios would scrawl crude stick diagrams on scraps of paper. This was almost never helpful.

Today was my first physiotherapy appointment in the Physical Medicine department at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, in service of  rehabilitating my broken elbow.

It went very well: my physio was understanding, clear, good at demonstrating and explaining, and sent me away not only with printed materials, but printed materials that have an access code that I can enter on a website, a website that has video walk-throughs of every exercise she prescribed, plus a way of logging.

I am a very motivated patient: there’s too many things I can’t do without my right arm. So I have every expectation that I will be diligent in my execution of my daily exercises.

I was encouraged to get my arm out of the sling, and to allow it to hang at my side. For the time being, this is going to look weird. I’m OK with that.

I was also encouraged, using pain as my guide, to do as many non-weight-bearing daily activities with my compromised elbow as possible: tying my shoes, brushing my teeth, etc. 

I took this as the all clear to do some set up in the print shop for a project that Lisa is undertaking: it felt good to be actually doing something useful, after a month spent mostly sedentary.

I have been on a Nichols and May kick of late.

One of my favourite Mike Nichols-directed films is the 1986 Heartburn, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, and written, semi-autobiography, by Nora Ephron. 

The Carly Simon song Coming Around Again figures significantly in the film. I was a huge fan when it came out. Now, Alanis Morissette and Carly Simon have teamed up on a duet, with Morissette taking the lead. It’s a lovely homage. 

I first discovered Gillian Welch in 2011 in a record store in Sweden. 

Her recent Tiny Desk concert, with David Rawlings, reminded me of how much I like her music.

(via Brad Barrish)

David Cain writes, in Give Yourself a Ripcord to Pull:

The low mood works like a bad hallucinogen that turns your personal world into its dark, anemic twin, a landscape drained of good possibilities.

Aside from being unpleasant, this kind of mood creates an immediate practical problem, in that it prevents you from identifying and taking the actions that might bring you out of it. The mind doesn’t know what to do in this state, because a world drained of positive possibilities isn’t one in which anything seems like a good idea. If your world currently seems like a place where things never work out, how are you going to work it out?

There’s a related phenomenon, which I’ve been noticing in myself  recently: the “low mood” is also a breeding ground for all manner of unrelated negative thoughts, negative thoughts that, when in thrall of the low mood, may appear to be its cause.

Maybe I’m pissed off, anxious, or angry because it’s raining out, or because my stomach hurts, or any of a million other invisible reasons. In that vulnerable state, a gateway is open to every unclosed loop that’s banging around in my head. 

I haven’t filed my corporate taxes yet!

There’s gout weed growing in the back garden! We’re out of my favourite cereal!

How come Lisa uses so many abbreviations when she texts!?

It’s chilly in here!

Did my father really love me at all?

In the growth medium of the low mood, any of these can appear to be the cause of the mood itself.

More often than not, they have nothing to do with it.

From The India Notes, India badly needs its own ElevenLabs, and it’s a billion-dollar opportunity:

Western cultures operate on what we might call “transactional efficiency.” The individual is the atomic unit. You can walk into a bank, buy a coffee, or close a business deal with minimal personal context. Trust flows through institutions - contracts, processes, brands. The system works because it’s designed to be impersonal. Efficiency emerges from keeping the personal separate from the professional. 

India operates differently. Here, the individual isn’t an atom; they’re a node in an interconnected web of relationships - family, community, school, hometown, caste. Trust doesn’t flow through institutions alone; it flows through people. Therefore, before any meaningful interaction or transaction can occur, one must first establish context. The conversation is the due diligence.

Reading this characterization of India, I realized that much the same thing can be said of Prince Edward Island: to truly inhabit this place requires finding your place in that”web of relationships,” and it can take decades to do that.

For someone newly-arrived on the Island, as, I imagine, for someone newly-arrived in India, this web is hidden. It’s one of the reasons why moving here can be so confoundedly complex and lonely, especially in the early days.

From an April 1961 profile in The New Yorker by Robert Rice:

Nichols and May began their life together with an improvisation. It was a performance designed solely for their private entertainment, though it may well have also entertained, or astounded, a number of loiterers in the waiting room of the Randolph Street station of the Illinois Central in Chicago, which is where it took place. One evening in the spring of 1954, Nichols was walking through the waiting room on his way to a train and Miss May was sitting on a bench reading a magazine. They knew each other by sight, both having for a time hung around the University of Chicago and been associated with various little-theatre groups that originated on or around its campus. As Nichols remembers it, he had avoided becoming acquainted with Miss May, because he was sure she was sneering at him. He still speaks of “the look of utter contempt” that he believes was on her face as she watched him playing a part in Strindberg’s “Miss Julie”—the first time he recalls seeing her. Miss May denies that she ever regarded Nichols with contempt. “I didn’t regard him at all,” she said recently. In any case, that day in the waiting room Nichols resolved to face up to Miss May. He sat down beside her and, talking out of the corner of his mouth, assumed the character of a secret agent making contact with a colleague. She responded in a heavy Russian accent, and they went into a long scene that Nichols recalls as “half spy, half pick-up.” They no longer remember just what they said, of course, but if by any chance the scene foreshadowed a spy spot they did a few months ago for “Monitor,” it may have begun something like this:

Nichols: I beg your pardon. Do you have a light?

Miss May: Yes, certainly.

Nichols: I had a lighter, but (pause) I lost it on Fifty-seventh Street!

Miss May: Oh. Then you’re Agent X-9?

(via SIX at 6)

I’ve been unable to find any trace of Robert Rice, save for his bylines in The New Yorker from the 1940s through the 1960s: he seems to have left no trace of himself. His most cited piece seems to be his 1958 profile of Leonard Bernstein.

Extension, flexion, supination, and pronation: the four elbow-involved tasks, the tasks my elbow, newly Steve Austined, resists.

The road from here, now that surgery is done, my new titanium part installed, my incision well-healing, is to therapeutically extend, flex, supinate, and pronate, and in so doing rebuild my range of motion.

Right now my range of motion is frustratingly limited, limited in a “that’s it, I’m fucked” way that requires deep belief in the little-by-littleness of physiotherapy.

Physio is one of those  allied health professions that ended up on the wrong side of medicare funding, along with dentistry, optometry, and psychology. Without private health insurance, you’re on your own.

Except that if you have had orthopaedic surgery you’re eligible for outpatient physio in the hospital. I’m waiting for a call back from them today with an appointment time, hopefully one this week.

In the meantime I’m homebrewing some basic movements to get a head start, mashing up learnings from YouTube et al, with confidence from my surgeon’s parting words that at this point there’s no bad way to move. 

Danny Gregory writes about the events that befall us, and the marks they leave:

Each of mine began as a kind of catastrophe — a crash, a fall, a diagnosis, a shock whenever I bit down hard. Each felt, in its moment, outsized and defining.

But time works a quiet magic: the pain retreats, the swelling fades, the drama becomes dinner party conversation.

Now they’re not catastrophes. They’re bookmarks. Chapter titles. Some I share easily — “this one’s from when I was in college” — others I keep for myself. They’re proof of what I’ve been through, not barriers to who I can be next.

I have a scar on my left index finger from where the saw slipped while Dad was showing me how to cut up the pieces of the barn board in the back yard, remnants left by the previous owner, who’d bought a barn at auction.

There are three tiny scars on my belly, marks that show where Dr. Fleming removed my gallbladder.

And now, here in the fracture clinic, I’ve just had the dressing removed on my radial head replacement surgery incision, and can see the mark I’ll carry forward from that, a four inch wound—well healed, it seems—around the circumference of my elbow.