Category: Musings

Total Hip Replacement – 9 Days In.

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

When I was looking into getting this done I found that the available information on line was a mix of promotional advertisement for services, mildly patronising video and that statistical outcome based discussion was sketchy. Urban legend, in other words the ubiquitous they, say that for everyone they know the operation went well and the results were better than before.

I understand that I am at the lower age demographic for osteo-arthritis induced hip replacement and that my disease was more advanced than most. This means that I was probably more handicapped to start with.

The question that always came to my mind was, “who had the first hip replacement and how did they persuade the poor soul to let them loose with the hacksaw?” “Which genius was sufficiently convinced that they could make things better?”

It is pretty clear to see that without operation my decline would have continued and perhaps accelerated. In this sense it could be said that advanced osteo-arthritis is by way of a slow killer. The will to live is gradually ground away like pepper corns in a pepper mill. It is an erosion of body and hence life.

I was ready for the operation.

My dressings are due to be changed tomorrow and thanks to the technical excellence of French medicine so far all seems ok.

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The overall experience at the relatively new private hospital at Plérin has been very good. The cleanliness and general ship shaped and Bristol fashion of the place build confidence. Having experienced several operating theatres I can safely say that the facility there is the best I have been in. The team were very good.

The sense I get is that the whole thing has been a tad over dramatized on-line. But maybe this is testament to the high quality of care I have received. A lot of stuff on-line is old and perhaps historically out of date.

I did not expect to be able to tie my shoe laces in under a week.

I did not expect to be able to open my legs in “box-split” direction as far as I can.

I did not expect to be able to pick things up from the floor…

The weirdest thing is, without doubt, feeling movement and motion in my right hip socket.

The pain levels have been tolerable though modern hospital medicine errs on the side of under medicating. Our GP is of a different view, old-school, and more keen to prescribe pain relief. We have a stocked home pharmacy so to speak. The wife has been very helpful and understanding.

In comparison to when I had fractured my left femoral neck six years ago the experience has been much easier so far.

But nobody has mentioned the difficulty sleeping which I am experiencing. Which for me is perhaps the most difficult part of the recuperation. I have sufficient medication to completely zonk out but I am aware that this comes with constipation and an elevated risk of fall. I have had two nights with two periods of around two hours continuous sleep over the weekend which has been an improvement.  

This is the area I am keen to see improve fast.

It can see the improvements in movement already. I am able to stand and cook stir-fry for around 40 minutes; I can take a shower and on Friday with the aid of crutches I walked around half a kilometre at the local port. Because I have experience from the injury before I have an inkling of time scales.

I can walk around the house with a single crutch. This has confirmed that I am in fact left handed. The amount of stuff I use my left hand for has become so obvious as that is my single crutch hand. I was “trained” to be right handed. But is pretty obvious I am not.

I have walked ten metres without any crutches. So I can see the progression.

I estimate that I could probably drive the car. It is easier getting in and out than before the slice and dice. The advice is not to drive and while I am still a visitor to the “opium den” this is wise. 

Boredom during the waking hours of night is perhaps the most irksome. Luckily shit TV is a good soporific.

All in all I am feeling a whole lot better and am more functional than we had anticipated and planned for. All those preparations have worked out worthwhile and made it easier for us both. It is mildly surprising in a pleasant way.

We shall see how things progress…

The Sleeper Must Awaken – Dune

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I came out of hospital yesterday with a newly fitted prosthetic hip. There remains pain but already I can sense enhanced movement. While I was in hospital I was re-reading “Dune” by Frank Herbert. As I suspected the text differs from some of the screen adaptations. What can be said with some certainty is that Herbert had a wide and vast imagination. To create self consistent “worlds” of that scope and complexity is no mean feat.

The Dune series have had a fairly deep impact upon my life, somehow it struck something of a chord. The observation  of politics religion  and power therein is well considered.  It presents a world in which the power of prophecy has massive impact. Where sayings passed on down are used to change the course of history. In the first book it introduces Paul Atreides the ducal heir and one who might fit the foretelling of Kwisatz Haderach. It shows how seeds of “prophecy” sown by a religious order can be used to manipulate events.

Paul hears perhaps his own Delphic entreaty “the sleeper must awaken”. In which he is in search of his true inner self. In his case this refers to a latent power and skill set . In the narrative he is the first of kind and struggles with what his nascent prescience suggests. He is caught in a perception where time is not distinct, quantised,  where past present and future are to an extent co-extant. This notion that we all might want to wake up to our inner potential is one which is perhaps universal to all of humanity. We need not lead a quasi-religious war simply work on self. In order to fully awaken Paul takes the potentially fatal “water of life”. This is an initiation of some sort after which he is markedly changed.

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It is not lost on me that perhaps by analogy my dreams bring snippets of prior lives. I have fallen asleep in between incarnations. And perhaps extrapolating wildly I too need to wake up {some more}.

I am fairly sure that I had no choice in making the life choices I made about two decades ago. No matter how much I may have tried to shoe-horn myself, it just did not work. That was a waking of sorts. I am now at a bit of a watershed. We prepared for this operation over weeks and now there is a little limbo to heal in. In the new year we shall find out if hip number 2 is a goer or not. {It probably is.} It seems mildly anti-climactic for now.

Because I am not really sleeping due to pain, for now I am not dreaming. This may of course change tonight or any night after that. The physio has been and I now ache…

It is kind of weird but I did not feel so drawn into Dune-world this time. The sands of Arrakis were a nice contrast to my LED lit sanitized new hospital room and bed. One minute it was blood pressure measurement next it was a gom jabbar…

The story of initiation and rite of passage is a common one in the arts and literature. It is in the ceremonial magic of award of university degree. The near step function change from before to after is perhaps dramatic. Yet all churches including science have rites. This includes Nobel prizes.

Every time I read Herbert I do wonder at the scope of his inner vision. It was pretty epic.

Massive Dreaming Symbol – Omen

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When the universe attempts to catch your attention it can do so in some unmissable ways. On Friday the wife dropped me off at a new private hospital for my hip operation and returned home to wait. I was due in for ~10:30 AM. It was slightly icy on the outward journey

When she got back to our house there was a big to do and someone had flipped their car over into our drive.

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The downward slope is our drive. This kind of thing is hard to miss. It stands out.

A car is the dreaming symbol for state of awareness (vehicle) . Someone unknown to us had flipped their state of awareness over into our drive. House is the dreaming symbol for view of the world. So just outside or very close to our view of the world someone had rolled over and otherwise flipped their view of the world, turned it on its head, completely.

No one was badly hurt but it made me wonder if other people, perhaps in a plural sense, had had their state of awareness with respect to us {me} flipped on the head.

We may never know…

A dream had while I was coming round from anaesthetic follows.

What is on my Dance Card?

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Most of the preparations have gone ahead. I had an argument with a loo seat yesterday. I was trying to fit a replacement one and I could not get the old fitting to budge. Erring on the side of caution I did not force it. It is a bit of a botch but it will have to do. The nurse had said that I should not do DIY in case I get a cut and thereby raise the preoperative risk of infection.

Tomorrow I am due an operation with general anaesthetic.

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Which means this time tomorrow I am scheduled to have had my replacement hip fitted. I might be back in my room. This schematic looks benign, the one below less so.

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I suspect that I will have a lot of bruising and maybe my leg will be a little blue…it does not look dainty or genteel. I will be wearing sexy stockings and be on the heparin injections.

The hospital bed has arrived and is installed downstairs here in the office and physio appointments are in the diary.

I probably won’t be adding to the blog for a while and will have to make old-school paper notes of any dreams.

I don’t know how well I am going to respond to the general anaesthetic. Ten years ago I had post-operative recall of watching the surgery from above. This was either an out of body experience or a dream. I have done even more meditation since then including things which you will not find discussed anywhere. I am sure that I will be physically unconscious, I am  not sure what my consciousness as a whole will do. In principle and assuming nothing goes wrong the surgery should take less time than the laparoscopic colectomy for the T3 tumour I had in 2015. I am less likely to wander off as it were.

I am going to be relying on people, those at the hospital and the wife here at home. The estimate is that it will take a couple for weeks for me to be able to get into a normal car. I will be on the compound during this time. I will be on crutches.

In the near future it is the hospital tomorrow and here thereafter. Maybe in a couple of weeks we can go for a hobble up at the seaside. I should be back at the stove cooking by then…

So not a lot on the dance card…

Man of Knowledge – Science?

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I’ll suggest that I am too whacko for mainstream scientists and not whacko enough and therefore science-phobic for what might be called new agers. As a consequence I inhabit a no man’s land regarded with suspicion from behind the machine guns of each set of trenches.

From my perspective I have met a few people who have harped on that they are men of knowledge yet they know very little about modern science. Seems to me they have a whopping great gap in that knowledge. Call me nit picking but this seems big to me.

I am a “nasty” spoilsport scientist on one hand and a unicorn jockey flaky tree hugger on the other. I have looked into the ”occult” and things like Buddhist philosophy further than most. Those who are experts in these areas do not know modern science to the extent I do. Yet they may imagine they know more thoroughly than I, because I am tainted by science and perhaps not “pure”.

Once people even paid me to teach “science”.

This morning I had an extensive and  highly technical dream concerning the excited electronic states of small single ringed substituted aromatic heterocycles. It looked at the charge distribution among various atoms and how that changed upon optical excitation and what that did for the pKa of various protons. I was discussing this with someone as a means for a targeted and localised change in pH in vivo. There was a time when I probably knew way more than was healthy about such things. One can extrapolate from single to double ringed heterocycles to an extent. If you know why this is interesting, you know..

Quite why I had this dream I do not know. We watched a film “The Exorcism”, Master Chef Australia and Celebrity MasterChef UK  last night. Neither of these would point at configuration interaction in electronic excited states. Nor would it explain Naropa or seraphim.

It is funny that “new agers” and luddites like Trump are suspicious of science and scientists and equally weird that science can glance down the nose at the uninitiated. I have had my vaccinations and can also do Vajrayana chanting. I can solve a two dimensional particle in a box Schrödinger equation {still} and know how to light incense sticks and smudge with smouldering sage, I can do shamanic drumming.

It is all about Garry Glitter really.  People want to know whose gang you are in…what your true colours are…

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Hopefully in a few weeks’ time I will feel a little less crippled.

Moving On – Wiped Clean

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This morning there were no highfalutin dreams and we have been up to the chemist to stash up on prescription drugs and to order the hospital bed to be delivered prior to my scheduled operation. Hopefully this will go ahead as planned but I did get some more opium painkillers as a contingency.  In a weeks time I should have a bionic hip and a nice scar. I will be wearing compression stockings and doing heparin injections. I will probably be more than a little off my face on morphine or some such.

Whatever happened before the operation will be pretty much wiped from my memory, not completely but there will be little importance attached. There is nothing which can be done in response to some of the things suggested thematically in dreams. They can just float on by like little fluffy clouds. The moment, if there ever was one, will have passed, like so many moments before. It is unlikely to be revived. Dreams may say otherwise but the aperture in the web of life will close.

Christmas will arrive like a commercial nightmare and the collective folly will be everywhere.

Life will be physio and slowly finding my feet with a different physical reality. The ligaments, tendons and muscles are too short and they will need some stretching. The theory is that most of my back pain has been due to the hip{s}. We shall see if the surgery proves this theory or not. There are a few more tasks to be done and the idea is to cook up some spicy food to put in the freezer. In general I am the curry/spice cook so I won’t be doing that for a while.

Things turn out the way things turn out. No biggie, that is just how things happen and are. It is foolish to stress on what might have been…

I will get to wear pyjamas for a few days which will be novel…we even bought a flannel to put in the wash bag…it will never get used…but they were insistent that I had one…

Expansion of Consciousness and Letting Go

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Before I get into this I will take a little diversion. It is to do with karmic “debt” which is another way of simply saying imbalance. If you take more than you give that is unbalanced and ultimately unsustainable. If we “wrong” someone we may feel guilty especially if we are socially caught in so doing, found out, reported to teacher. We may be socially required to say “sorry” even if we do not mean it. It does not change the “wrong” one iota. It is the sort of thing our mothers might require of us if we stole our sister’s Maltesers. It is a social “peace” keeping. It does not change the karma one tiny bit. Until such time we feel it in our hearts to be wrong, we will continue to accrue karmic debt from similar acts. Were the scales to fall from our eyes one fine day we might want to change our ways. We might re-orient our behaviour towards our fellow human beings, try to stop being selfish bellends and do some nice self-less stuff for a change. We would not do this for “show” or PR. Karma does not give a toss about PR. We can never undo a wrong we have meted out to someone nor can we “make it up to them”. What we can do is ensure that we do not inflict that behaviour on others.

Say for example you were to slag me off. You could never undo that. What you could do is make a general effort not to repeat this behaviour, not to inflict it on others. You could strive to be generally more positive and less derogatory. You could balance out your unpleasantness by being more pleasant generally. In so doing you would start to balance your books with the universe. There is no requirement to do anything in respect of me, rather a more general debt to the universe. I personally am unlikely to feel aggrieved or owed. So to try to make it up to me would be silly and probably disingenuous.

Here we have an example of a consciousness expanded away from the petty and personal to the wider and universal. At the moment it seems Trump takes everything personally and vindictively so. His focus is centered on him and does not have a wider universal view. It is all about his personality and his sense of self. He feels hard done by a lot of the time and is prone to playing angry victim.

This sense of victimhood is shared by vast tracts of humanity; they bemoan that life is unfair and complain that things are not as they should be. They imagine life a burden forced upon them. They try to have life on their own terms. If they don’t like how they look they will pay a plastic surgeon to surgically disfigure them. Their consciousness is not expanded beyond their perception of how the meat looks. They are fixated on something arguably silly.

In the blue books opus the Tibetan discusses initiation as a sequential expansion of consciousness, here diagrammatically represented.

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In the diagram, the scale is reconfigured at the end of each open cone. The diameters represent the breadth of consciousness and width of inclusiveness. Each successive cone is an order of magnitude increase in breadth of consciousness. The scale is perhaps logarithmic.

According to the text the consciousness of a fifth degree initiate differs very markedly from your normal common or garden human. What might concern them is not the same as the house home heart wallet and genitals of normal people. Normal people worry about a host of mundane things which in the wider evolutionary scheme do not matter very much. Your much sought after promotion in job is of no consequence in terms of your spiritual evolution.

If you think of a snake as it grows and evolves it has a tendency to shed its skin so that it, no longer constrained, can grow. A similar view can be had here. As a person evolves the ways and thought patterns of the old life must be shed. Let go of. So that a newer nascent consciousness can expand unburdened by the habits {bad} of the past. The fresh new skin does not need the scaly old ways to constrain it. This letting go can mean relationships which drag you down or they can simply need recalibrating. Old habits die hard and these are the detritus that needs letting go of.

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Being obsessed  with little trite details can prevent the expansion of consciousness. One needs to move from the petty and personal to more universal and joined up. To recognise there is but one life to which we all pertain.

To the would be initiate expansion of consciousness and spiritual evolution are the only goals of merit. They seek to rise above the mundane and not remain trapped in the mire which is often petty and of a deeply personal nature.

Letting go is vital in order to enable expansion of consciousness. Mental skin, rigid self-image must be shed again and again.

You cannot expand your consciousness by keeping the same view of the world you currently have. It acts as barrier to evolution, a ghetto wall which keeps you constrained.

Letting go is a truly vital component to the expansion of consciousness. Letting go vivifies.

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Slapdash or Thorough?

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With human nature being as it is if you offer someone an apparently low risk “quick” shortcut to just about any situation, they will take it in preference over a risky more long term perhaps considered path. In movies this shortcut mentality often leads people into dire situations which might have been avoided. In wanting the easy out they can fuck up and badly so. People avoid effort and application and can find themselves up the proverbial creek in a barbed wire canoe.

This tendency could be easily exploited. I know this well.

Most people bodge, cut corners and have a hasty slapdash mentality. Patience is as rare as a full refreshing fresh water lagoon on the Nullarbor plain in dry season. People like band aid fixes, an Elastoplast quick answer. One that gets a “problem” off the desk at least for the time being. Better still if they can palm the “problem” off onto someone else, make it an SEP. The greasy buck never stops.

The problem is that shoddy and slapdash can create more problems than it solves.

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Today I have been cleaning out the sewerage drains to the cess pit. They have been problematic since we arrived. They are designed for old-school high cistern tsunami-flush systems not modern eco-cistern flushes. I tend to have to clean about twice a year and my plumber’s rods have paid for themselves in saved money many times over.

We could call it “Zen and the Art of Cleaning out the Shitter”.

The idea being that it is a job that needs done before my bionic hip.

Because my motion is increasingly spastic I could not perform one of the fiddly tasks to  get a rod around a partial U-bend. I tried and had to ask the wife to help. There was a choice to do a partial clean and maintenance or do a thorough job. She was able to do the fiddly bit and I was able to finish a thorough job. The rods, now washed, are drying on the drive.

I was less Zen today because of the awkwardness of my body and the pain in my hips.

Similarly the ceiling in the lounge could use another coat of paint at one end. We could leave it or I could do it tomorrow. The temptation to let standards drop is stronger because of my incapacity. We have already made a few compromises. They are realistic.  Time is running out a little.

I would like to have all the “heavy” tasks out of the way before they slice me up. I don’t know how incapacitated I will be nor for how long. There are some things that only I can do.

People can mistake being slapdash as being clever or cunning. Cleverness is not the same as wisdom which prefers a more thorough approach.

Wisdom can appear to take more time in the short term, but in the integral over all events, thoroughness is often a saver of time.

Slapdash people never get to see the experimental data which backs us this postulate {above}. They are hasty and prejudiced. They KNOW they are right.

For the Avoidance of Doubt

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It is possible that people can overinterpret things and see meanings which are not there. They may imagine personal messages which do not exist.  

This blog is discursive {at best} and exploratory. It is often quasi-stream of consciousness. It is not intended as any form of guidance or teaching. There are ramblings etc.

I have a lot of time on my hands…

If you are imagining that I am in some way providing you a steer, a lead or any such thing then you had better consult a psychology professional or better still call the mothership. Maybe it is time that you were beamed back on board?

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I am a retired person living on below the fulltime EU minimum wage and my time is allocated to gardening, DIY, cooking and watching TV. On occasion we go for a walk up on the coast. That is the physical plane reality. I rarely meditate these days because I no longer need to.

I am hopefully due a hip replacement operation soon and that is as far as my ambitions go. It is not very complicated.

If you are imagining anything more grandiose you might not be well grounded.

I am not seeking anything…I will struggle with more than any fleeting contact with people “off compound”. I am unlikely to leave the department before end of summer next year.

That is all…

Abnormal – discard all anomalous records

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I found these instructions on line:

Delete Specific Anomaly

You can delete individual anomalies using one of two methods:

1. Delete Directly

Step 1: Click on Archived from the navigation bar in the Anomalies section to view all archived anomalies.

Step 2: Locate the anomaly that you want to delete and click on the Delete icon located on the right side of the anomaly.

Step 3: A confirmation modal window will appear, click on the Delete button to permanently remove the anomaly from the system.

2. Delete via Action Menu

Step 1: Click on the archived anomaly from the list of archived anomalies that you want to delete.

Step 2: You will be directed to the anomaly details page. Click on the Settings icon located at the top right corner of the page and select “Delete” from the dropdown menu.

Step 3: A confirmation modal window will appear, click on the Delete button to permanently remove the anomaly from the system.

After clicking on the Delete button, your anomaly is successfully deleted and a confirmation message appears on the screen.

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In “A” level science exams candidates are given a data set for which they can be asked to find the mean and standard deviation. Sometimes those data sets contain an anomalous point. Candidates are encouraged to discard or discount this datum point from fitted {by eye} lines of best fit and out of statistical analysis. They can be asked to justify why they discarded the anomalous data point.

From an early age the anomalous is suspect and can be discounted when it is convenient so to do.

Without being dramatic or upset about it I find it ok to speculate that I am abnormal. One could even go so far as to call me an anomalous being. As such it is entirely justifiable to ignore and otherwise discount anything I might say or do.

I am not glamoured by my abnormality nor do I find it a turn on. I am simply not normal. No biggie. No drama. I am not special either.

Life goes on just fine there is no need to take me into account. Even if one did it would not sway the average or normal much at all.

I am comfortable with this detached analytical thinking. There is no supposed to or should.

One of the things that I have pretty much stopped doing is “reaching out” to others. Experimentally this causes a lot less hoo-ha and drama. I don’t like to cause people problems so by not impinging on their lives or otherwise inflicting myself I limit any harm I might do. I am less harmful. I cause no perturbation.

The good thing about a blog is that if you don’t like it, it only takes a click of a mouse to leave. If someone arrives by accident they can leave intentionally PDQ.  Any accidental perturbation is largely remedied in an instant. If people want to have a look-see they can, there is no pay wall, no fee and I am not tarting for anything.

If people want to read my ramblings that is up to them…

I’ll make a comment here. Modern psychology and psychiatry would very likely medicate and or section under the mental health act many of the figures in religion, the very pillars thereof. The visionary basis of “religious” experience might be diagnosed as an illness or a syndrome. Someone could win a prize and have it named after them.

It too would be abnormal though history has suggested {with hindsight} that it has also been significant even in a socio-political sense.

Normal is not always best…

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