No electronic stimulation, lavender sprinkled liberally around, a chapter or two of my book and, last night, a new trick - smearing castor oil on my eyelids. All of these may be old wives' tales, or sound advice - who knows? - but it shows I'm ready to try any tips I receive.
The latest piece of advice came from Frances Simpson, and turned out to be a fairly expensive experiment. I went to the chemist/pharmacy to ask if they had any castor oil and was initially told no, but they could order it for me. The assistant then remembered that somebody else had ordered a bottle a few weeks ago but had never picked it up - I soon found out why - it was £18 for a 500ml bottle!
I definitely feel my progress has moved on another notch this week - I feel more able now. Yesterday, I was down the village and popped in to see Ross in Tease - he had borrowed the car on Sunday to go to Costco to buy goods for the coffee shop. Ross had parked it next door in the museum car park, so I asked him to give me the keys and I would take it home - it's only a short drive. I managed fine, and when I got home, I decided to start filling the car with some of the junk in the garage that had to go to the tip.
I'm able to do several minutes on the static bike now and usually I can get it going straight away - that's something I wasn't able to do a few days ago. I managed 8 minutes today - a paltry amount, I know, but a huge improvement on the pathetic weakling who could barely manage a few revolutions before.
Today we were at the physio again and she seemed pretty pleased with my progress and told me just to keep going with what I was doing - and also told me I could ditch the last walking stick, except for when I was planning a very long walk, when she thought it might still be a good idea for me to take it with me as moral support, if nothing else. That's a bit of a breakthrough as well.
She measured my angle of bend again and was a little surprised to find it was still only 90 degrees, but the measurement is done when I'm lying down on the bed and I have to slide my leg up. I find this the hardest way to do it and I know I get more than 90 degrees when I do some of the other exercises, particularly those under stress.
My next appointment with the physio is not until the end of January now, which will be 12 weeks after the operation and she reckons that's the very worst part over then. She hoped too that the fluid/swelling on my knee may have gone down a bit by then, which should also help me get a bit more bend hopefully.
It's Tuesday and Jo's away to pick up Luca from school, as usual. Carole's coming over tonight for tea and will take him home. I've been putting a few pictures etc up downstairs. I had planned to just use tacks/screws/drill as necessary but Jo had bought a little tool which is meant to be a simple, clean way of fixing them to walls:
Simple enough to use, but will it last, particularly with the larger, heavier items? Time will tell. Meanwhile, here's some of today's work in the study/exercise room downstairs:
So Andy Murray easily won the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year on Sunday - I should think so too. I felt I had to make sure there were no last minute anti-Scots votes which might deprive him of his just desserts and, for the first time ever, I went online to vote for him. In the end, it was a landslide.
With Xmas coming up a lot of TV and radio series are coming to an end. On Saturday, it was the last episode of Borgen, the Danish series about politics. I enjoyed it, but I know the principal character (Birgitte Nyborg) annoyed Jo a bit - she's a bit of an idealist and sometimes a bit too good to be true - Birgitte that is, not Jo.
It was also the penultimate episode of Homeland on Sunday - the finale is this coming weekend, and we were left with a real cliffhanger.
It's now early Wednesday morning in Adelaide and Kelly, Chris and little Miller will soon be getting ready for their long journey - they leave there first thing on Thursday morning their time. Scott, Lucy and the boys have a bit more time before they're on their way from Oregon, but both families are scheduled to arrive within roughly half an hour of each other at Dyce on Friday morning.
It will probably be Ross and Jo that will take the cars and pick them up. I'll probably head to their chalet at Inchmarlo and wait there for them, while making sure everything's in order for them.
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