Hail,
Just a brief update on Sarah for anyone who’s interested.

She is home, which is wonderful, and reading amusing and familiar books. She spends a fair amount of time in bed or resting, but she is mobilizing, with the air of two walking sticks. They are stylish and technical looking with built in shock absorbers and she ordered them off the internet from China. There is a lot she can’t do – she can’t pick up anything she drops, for example, or put on her own clothes – but she is mobilizing a little better every day, taking slightly longer steps, possibly getting a little less pain every day.

The main thing is the surgery is behind her, rather than ahead, and she is getting better rather than worse. It is a long process, and I think she got a little discouraged reading about the experiences of other people who had the surgery who were back at work within three weeks. I have pointed out that the surgeon said that she had one of the most advanced cases of osteo-arthritis he had seen in someone that age, that she had had pain and decreased mobility for decades before-hand, and that the views of people in the net are not a representative sample of the real world.

Anyway, small steps. She is on a tapering dose of opiates. Initially she had ice-packs, now we have moved to the topical application of cats. The main priority is keeping her mood up and making sure she does not fracture – the next six weeks are very fragile, and her bones are very thin. After that we are really hammering the vitamin D, gentle exercise and calcium – which I am suggesting will be a holiday somewhere tropical where she can eat yoghurty stuff from a tall glass and so forth. In the interim today she is going out to look at the chooks.

Obviously, a lot more has been going on - there was the surgery, we are moving house, that kind of stuff. More news later, and a return to writing soon.

John