Introducing a New Page and a Final Knee Update

As I was browsing blogs today, I saw that Elana Johnson is looking for outlining help, so I added a new page devoted to that topic. I’d been meaning to anyway because in the past few days I incorporated another step into my process. Once I had my current outline complete, I broke the story back down into its separate subplots so I could spot any weaknesses. I knew that Jess’s plot had plenty of action, but was short on emotional development, and Kasey’s was really incomplete. I won’t go into the details here, but you can see the whole page if you click on this link. For those of you following me on RSS or by email, I have no idea whether you got notification that I added a page. If so, I’m sorry for the redundancy.

In other news, my knee is healing very rapidly and at my post-op appointment the doctor was surprised I was getting around so well. He said he’d disturbed the tissue a lot where the cyst was, and that he’d had a difficult time sealing the joint capsule because the tissue was weak in that spot. Apparently every time he flexed my knee synovial fluid shot across the room. Cool. I guess it was a little like trying to weld up the rusty floorboards of a ’57 Chevy. You just keep burning through. At this point it seems like he got the job done, but I won’t know for sure for awhile.  I’m supposed to avoid any twisting, kneeling, squatting, bending, and side forces (all things that happen on a regular basis in my work, so I’m still taking time off) but walking is considered excellent therapy (which is a good thing, since I walked a mile the 4th day after surgery and several times since then). I have pretty much full range of motion back, though there is some tightness when I bend or straighten my knee all the way.

Because the whole ordeal was so different from what I expected, so much easier, it doesn’t seem completely real. I feel like I’m milking it by taking it easy—even though I’ve been told it will take weeks, even months, to completely heal—and that no matter how good I feel, it would be easy to re-injure it.  I have to remind myself that my generous customer has an investment in this, and that I have to be respectful of that. Still, I keep finding myself having conversations like this with my knee:

Me: Oh, wow, that daisy is a lot taller than the stuff behind it. I better go move it.

Knee: Yeah, I’m not gonna dig up anything.

Me: What’s your damage?

Knee: Uh… surgery?

I think it’s finally sunk in, and I’m learning to accept that it’s okay to kick back and enjoy myself for the next few weeks. The only real problem I’ve had is being tired. A day of walking around or an hour or so of watering and deadheading my garden wipes me out the way a whole day of work usually would. The other thing is that my knee is like a little furnace, generating an enormous amount of heat. I’ve learned that all this is normal. It’s weird, though, because even though I’ve been sitting on my butt for the most part, I really haven’t gained any weight. No change in diet, vast change in exercise, and yet my body seems to have adjusted. I think a lot of calories are going into the healing process. Which is something I never would have believed, considering how localized the injury is, and how little pain and loss of mobility I’ve had.

Hmmm. You learn something new every day.