Even more progress

So get this. I can walk again, almost like normal. Still no sensation in the right half of my body, but the muscles work and they do the stuff they're supposed to do, mostly by simply remembering the stuff they did before. It's all rote repetition and continuing movement--that's the key. I can play the piano--very badly!--but I can play, again on the basis of memory and all that continued repetition. It's all still there. And I'm looking forward to working on it, too: I keep repeating the six-million dollar man mantra (which I'm just about to flub): we can rebuild him. We can make him better than he was before.

Now, I always was my own best cheerleader, but the process of recovery is amazing. I can't believe the body's innate ability to overcome trauma. I'm staggered by it. To give credit where credit is due, my dad attributes this trajectory to the FOCC diet of flax seed oil and cottage cheese. I'm willing to give him a little something on that. It certainly makes me feel healthy and clean, and as I wrote earlier I do get to eat other stuff, so I can hardly claim to feel deprived. But I have to choke down my FOCC first thing.

But it's working: in a single week I've gone from not walking at all to walking for twenty minutes a day; I can write, I can play the piano, I can annoy my family with really stupid jokes (I just think everything is so funny these days--a byproduct of the surgery? Did they nick something?). I still have to be careful carrying things in my right hand, which is weak and has no sense at all of what it is touching. Can you imagine if I suddenly started stroking some complete stranger?!! Eughie! But these workarounds are nothing, once you realize and accept that you're going to need the workaround.

As Clint says, "A man's gotta know his limitations!"