Personal Update

I'm happy to report that everything has gone swimmingly with my dad's ankle fusion! The clinic took his cast off, and he now walks (a slow shuffle for now) with a cane and a special boot. After he sent back the roller, he had to deal with the fact that his mobility actually got worse even as his ankle got better.

He flew back to Japan yesterday and arrived safely. He's in a good mood and everything is on track. In a few months he should be able to return to a very active lifestyle.

On the adoption front, our worker has finished our homestudy and submitted it for state filing. We need to get cracking on that 10 additional hours of foster care training for 2007. We missed some excellent training opportunities for various business and personal reasons, but it shouldn't be too difficult to catch up.

Lastly, I've been doing some work promoting a highly targeted anti-racism blog. It's called CKY=KKK. If you have a Youtube account and an interest in anti-racism, especially racism directed against Chinese and Asians, I suggest you visit it and do some of the Youtube actions. On the other hand, the videos that the blog links to are really filthy and disgusting, and you have to watch at least part of them to figure out what this is all about, so don't go there unless you are ready. Seriously!

Here's a Youtube video, safe for everyone, with awesome energy that will probably increase the healthiness of your blood circulation.

First Breakfast Duty - "Daily Routine" Post

This week I really need to be at work around 8:30, which means leaving around 7:45. I am not a morning person. Since my job has been so busy lately, I've foisted the breakfast cooking duties onto my husband. Today, I finally stepped up. This is great practice for when we have a child and start having regular family breakfasts!

6:30 AM: Wake up. Take a quick shower and get dressed.

6:45 AM: Start the rice (put in the cooker last night). Start miso soup boiling. Start taking stuff out of the fridge.

6:50 AM: Float a few dried anchovies and bonito flakes in the boiling water. Prep veggies. Put mackerel in broiler. Dad rolls into kitchen and takes over because I'm not grating the daikon the right way. Asks me for a cutting board, gets impatient because I take more than 1.5 seconds to clear off the board for him, reaches for it, overextends and falls over. Yikes! Dad is righted and daikon eventually grated.

7:00 AM: Strain out anchovies and give to dog. Add miso paste and seaweed to the soup. Add veggies to soup.

7:05 AM: Turn over mackerel. Put tofu in soup. Turn soup down to simmer.

7:10-7:15 AM: Serve soup, rice, mackerel with sides of kimchi, grated daikon, natto and more seaweed (husband and dad help at this point).

7:15 AM - 7:35 AM: Family breakfast achieved!

This kind of breakfast is intense to prepare, but it really starts off the day with a nutrition explosion.

Checkout

We picked up my father today from the hospital. It took all morning to check him out. He's doing very well.

I think the doctors have done a great job with his surgery, but I get so mad at the way the system treats patients when it comes to rehabilitation. Ankle fusion surgery takes only a few hours but the full recuperation period is around six months, and there's usually two months of no weight bearing. You would think that doctors provide detailed rehabilitation advice on how to get through daily life, but it's not the case. The best resource I found was message boards and Yahoo Groups of people who've already had the surgery.

It was because of advice from a forum that I rented a roll-walker. That's one of the goofy-looking devices pictured to the above left. My dad would never have thought to get one on his own. Yesterday, I asked the doctor if the cast might cover the knee and interfere with the use of the roll-walker or roll-a-bout. He gave me a funny look and said that my dad was too active to use one of those, they were only for very inactive or obese people, and he might as well just use crutches to get around for two months. I can't even begin to say how bad that advice was. Thank goodness I'd already rented one by then, and the cast isn't too high to interfere with use. My dad has immediately picked up on the walker and loves it. There's no reason at all to use crutches, except for going up or down steps. It looks like he'll be taking the walker into the kitchen soon and cooking a lot of his own meals, which is ideal because he loves to cook.

In Japanese culture, doctors are gods. It's scary seeing my dad, who is a fearless questioner of authority, transform into a timid, apologetic, childlike person when faced with someone in a white coat. I've heard that it used to be common practice in Japan to lie to patients for their own good. "I think Mr. Sato only has a few weeks to live. But I'll go ahead and tell him that his cancer is in remission, so he and his family can really enjoy those few remaining weeks!" That was one of the reasons for pushing for the procedure to be done here in America. It's not that the doctors are better (I think they're very skillful both here and in Japan) but the family is here in America to sit with my dad and ask reasonable questions.

I've also broken down and finally added an "ankle fusion" category to the labels. I've been talking about it so much this month, I might as well.

Ankle Fusion Complete

We were told that the surgery went exactly as planned. My mother and I waited in his assigned hospital room. When they wheeled him in, he was smiling and cracking the usual inappropriate jokes: "I feel like an Iraqi!" he said.

There's two things everyone should get after receiving general anesthesia: lip balm and cough drops. He definitely needed both. We left him in a good mood, very lucid, describing the pain in his ankle as no more than a 1 out of 10. My husband and I are going to pick him up tomorrow morning after the physical therapy people clear him to leave.

Ankle Fusion Surgery Tomorrow

Tomorrow is finally the big day. We went out tonight to a great Korean restaurant and had bulgogi and seafood pancakes.

My dad was in good spirits. Everyone was cracking jokes about his foot. The best was my husband's extended description of the hospital scene: the 23-hour hospital stay was because it would take exactly that long to saw his foot off, and meanwhile the blood would run down into a gutter at the side of the bed and into a small pond outside the hospital where it would feed some carp which would would then be served for lunch in the hospital cafeteria. My mother reminded him to write "not this one, stupid" on his good ankle in magic marker. I told him to make sure the doctors knew they were supposed to be taking off a foot, not adding one on. My whole family has a weird sense of humor, in case you haven't guessed.

The hospital and the doctor are very good, and I'm sure he'll be just fine. I'll be there most of the day tomorrow. It's the same place I had my laparoscopy.

I've been really active these past few days in posting comments at other adoption blogs and racial issues blogs. I don't feel like posting about my own adoption plans now, though... I feel like everything is on hold because of the surgery. I'll see if I can turn one of those long comments I made this week into a blog post later this weekend.