Monday, June 10, 2024

Three Beautiful Things 06-09-2024: Early Mornings with Copper, A Little Time at Vizio U, A Month Under My Belt: What Now?

1.  Copper loves being out from the room he spends most of his time in. Since my transplant, I can no longer have Copper with me at night. Complicating this situation is that Gibbs and Copper can't be in any room at the same time because Gibbs hassles Copper -- bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, chase. 

So that Copper and I can have time in the living room together, I'm now getting up between 4-5 a.m. and letting Copper out while Debbie and Gibbs are still upstairs in bed. In addition, if Debbie and Gibbs go to bed early -- which is fairly often -- I stay up and Copper and I have time together in the living room then. 

I find other times to be with Copper in the living room. Sometimes Debbie leaves the house and takes Gibbs away in the car. Sometimes they hang out together on the patio. And, sometimes, it works to put Gibbs on his leash and Copper will cautiously make his way out to the living room and sometimes, when leashed, Gibbs remains quiet when he sees Copper. 

It's usually minor, but one drawback to getting up so early and sometimes staying up for a while after Debbie and Gibbs retire is I experience some sleep deprivation. 

That was true today. I didn't get many hours of sleep Saturday night leading into Sunday morning and I often had to interrupt those hours with nocturnal trips to the bathroom. 

This is all to say that today was a low key day primarily because I spent a few hours back in bed, just making up for sleep I didn't get, and am I ever happy that my life is such that I could saw some daytime logs and it didn't affect anyone or anything! 

2. Today, I managed to slip into Vizio University briefly, but I didn't want to fall asleep at my desk and embarrass myself, so I just roamed around online, looking for podcasts, interviews, or other material illuminating the work of Eric Rohmer. I'm both fascinated and perplexed by repeatedly finding out that Quinten Tarantino LOVES Eric Rohmer. So I began to wonder, is there something in Tarantino's movies I could be seeing that points to the influence of Eric Rohmer? I don't know. I didn't make much headway today looking into this question, but I might have found some scraps of comments about Rohmer and genre and some other scraps about Tarantino and genre that might point to Tarantino admiring Rohmer because Rohmer's work is difficult to classify and knowing that Tarantino seems to thrive on bending classic genre expectations, making him, also, difficult to classify as a filmmaker. 

3. As of Saturday, June 8th, yesterday, it's been four weeks since I had kidney transplant surgery. 

Everything, my blood work, the way I feel, the progress of the healing of the surgery site, points to this having been a successful surgery and my first four weeks of recovery have gone superbly.

So, today, knowing that I'll be at the transplant clinic tomorrow, June 10th, I am starting to wonder just how much I might be able to spread my wings a bit. I know and I accept there are things I can't do until more months have passed. I just can't be putting stress on my abdomen with lifting, bicycling, or other bodily movement that puts stress on my core. 

But, how about socializing, going shopping, and other such things, especially after Thursday, June 13th, when I see a urologist in Spokane to have the stent going from my new kidney to my bladder removed? Once that happens, I can drive again. The world will widen a bit. What will I be able to do?

Debbie and I talked today about what we want to cover on Monday when Nurse Jenn comes in the examination room to go over what will be next with labs, clinic visit, changes in medication, and other things that might need covering. 

In my blog post tomorrow, I'll be able to report on what Nurse Jenn had to say and write a bit more about how things might open up a bit for me during Weeks 5-8 post-transplant.  

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