I had my follow-up visit with the surgeon today. The good news is, I’m okayed for all normal daily bendy-stretchy-movement activity except for the 10 lb weight limit. Plus baths approved as soon as the glue falls off (likely 4+ more weeks) The incisions are healing well, and I am encouraged to trust my body to tell me if I’ve overtaxed it.

The great news is, the surgeon also said, “You can eat anything you like!” Hooray, weeks earlier than the original guidelines. A ton of qualifiers and cautions followed the happy announcement, basically “take it slow, add a food or two at a time and adjust based on consequences.”

So it’s still gonna be a couple of weeks before I’m eating “normally” again. But I can have oatmeal and bacon again, and skin-on mashed potatoes, so all is well.

We celebrated with a trip to the grocery store (Spouseman drove me to the appt, driving is still kinda awkward) so I have my canned fruits & other treats, plus am restocked on gut-friendly kefir and loads of lean protein choices to aid the whole healing process. Plus loads of stuff for making next week’s Midwinter Holiday Meal into a proper feast.

Healing is wild. Every day I wake up thinking, “yesterday was hard, but today I feel fine.” And the next day, I think, “Oh, no. I was wrong, yesterday I was still blah, but TODAY…” And every time, it’s true. I’m finding progress is best measured by how hard it is to tie my shoes. (First 4 days, impossible, Day 5-6, I could untie them w/o pain, but not tie, yesterday, I TIED MY OWN BOOTS, woo!

For the last week, getting out of chairs or bed was awkward, and walking around the house every hour has been serious aerobic exercise. Today I was up and moving for 3 whole hours and walked around a whole store. Progress!

It did kinda wipe me out for the rest of the day, but here I am, cozy on my Base Of Operations (aka the couch) with hot tea, tasty white cake, and hitting season 2 on my rewatch of Person Of Interest. (I have watched so much deliciously Bad TV the last week. So. Much. I decided I needed some good TV to balance it out. Person Of Interest kicks ass.)

I’m even getting a little writing done, if book promotion, 3-week overdue convention prep, and research all count, and today, I’m saying they do.

Wrapping up with random observations to share:

• Netflix/Hallmark/Prime Christmas romance movies are…something. I enjoy the flimsy plots that pair up grumpy, pretty people who realize they’re Meant To Be A Couple, but too many of the newer movies do a really bad job sidestepping the weirdness of the heteronormative monogamy-or-bust elements, the royalty worship, and the cognitive dissonance of showcasing Christian traditions without being in any way overtly Christian.

• The Princess Switch series, The Christmas Prince series, and a few others all manage to create enough of a fantasy ambiance to smoke & mirror over the other stuff. The rest are shudder-cringey..

• Also on the media side, TV & movie portrayals of hospital recovery wards are even less realistic than the way they show airplane seats.

• fun fact I learned from the surgeon: peanut butter can constipatory (and yes, constipatory is a real word)

• Pippin loves cooked chicken and turkey almost as much as he loves yogurt. He hadn’t had much exposure to those meats until recently, but he’s making up for lost time.

and speaking of Pippin, here are the latest Pips Pics.

Or! OR! if you like your local library, you could request a purchase. Free for you, sale for me, everyone wins.

Most libraries need the following info for ordering print books:

• Title: Relics From A Traveling Show

• Author: K. M. Herkes

• ISBN: 9781945745201 (paperback)

  Every library system does things a little differently, but most want their collections to serve their communities, so most of them are very responsive to patron requests.

If you like novels more than short stories, I recommend my series The Rollover Files for hopepunk tales of about an alternate world where moms with midlife crisis superpowers have been saving the world and making the military nervous since 1943.

I also have a completed, quirky slow-burn science fiction thriller duology with a romance chaser: The Stories Of The Restoration.

All my titles are available from Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Hoopla, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Overdrive and many other fine booksellers.

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