1. I'm grateful that my good fortune in life makes it possible for me to treat the days and the nights somewhat similarly. Night time is not, for me these days, a time of restful sleep. When I do sleep, it's restorative, but it never lasts long because I visit the bathroom so frequently. To make up for not sleeping as much at night as I'd like, I am spending longer periods of time in bed during the day, napping, reading, and resting. I'm aware, at the same time, that I also need to move around, walk, keep my blood flowing, especially through my legs. So I don't just stay in bed. My favorite way of being on my feet is to work in the kitchen, either preparing food or doing light cleaning.
I don't know if, with time, I'll have fewer interruptions during the night. If not, well, I'm determined to roll with whatever my situation will be and figure out positive ways to deal with, as they say, the cards I'm being dealt!
2. Soon after the May 11th surgery, I commented in this blog that I hoped to find a book (or books) on animals to read. I am strongly drawn to books (and documentary films) that explore the wonders of different animals. Over the last few years I've read about beavers, buffalo, eels, octopi, whales, salmon, and a bunch of other creatures on land, in the air, and in the water.
Kenton Bird responded to my post about animal books by asking me what I like to read. A friend of his, David Johnson, helped Maurice Hornocker, a wildlife biologist who has dedicated decades of work to studying the cougar, write a memoir about his tireless quest to understand the mountain lion.
The book's title is Cougars on the Cliff. Kenton sent me a copy, signed by David Johnson.
I began reading it Saturday night and continued today.
So far, it's an astounding story, chronicling the brutal winter conditions in huge expanses of the Middle Salmon River drainage and primitive areas where Horonocker, the men he started his work with, and their eager hound dogs go in search of secretive, sly, shy, wily cougars and began their years and years and years of study.
This book, like so many I've read about other animals, works to alleviate common fears. It works to set the record straight about what dangers they do and do not present in the wild. As is so often the case with wild animals, the mountain lion had been regarded as a menace and its populations were decimated by bounty hunters and other trophy seekers.
Maurice Hornocker set out, in his research, to determine if the mountain lion really is the menace, the threat, that it was reputed to be and, right now, I am reading about the earliest days of his dedication to learning more about the cougar and, again, the brutal winter mountain conditions he hiked in, tracked cougars in, and endured in order to engage in this lifelong effort.
3. When I received a new kidney, the surgeon put a stent from the kidney to my bladder. Sometime in mid-June, I'll go to the transplant program's urologist and have the stent removed. When Nurse Jenn removed my catheter about ten days ago, she explained that removing the stent would be a similar procedure.
Today, I decided to look into this procedure more fully and I read up on how the stent is removed and even found a YouTube video that showed the instrument the doctor will use, a cystoscope. The cystoscope has a tiny camera on the end of it and so I went on a video journey to the center of someone's bladder and watched as the doctor clamped onto the stent and easily pulled it out -- not that different, once clamped on to, from what I experienced when Nurse Jenn removed my catheter.
I like knowing what to expect in this whole transplant process and everything I learned today about the removal of the stent reassured me that the procedure doesn't take long and will not involve much discomfort, if any.
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