I had a minor accident this week which is nagging at me for what it portends. Jan and I were unloading bags of weeds at the Hyde Park green-waste disposal site. This has been redesigned for the convenience of the user, except that the new design has increased the danger of using the site. Prior to the redesign one pulled up alongside one of two massive, uncovered dumpsters, each the length of a semi-trailer. In fact that is how they are hauled away to be emptied: they are winched onto the back of an empty semi-trailer frame. One stood in the back of one's truck to peer into the dumpster. Now they have built a small hill beside the dumpsters up which one drives, so that, instead of emptying your waste over your head into the body of the dumpster one is on the level of the top of the dumpster looking down in. (If you ever fell in, you would not be able to extricate yourself since the sides look a good 10 feet from the bottom.) The idea of the redesign obviously was to get more waste in the dumpsters and less on the ground. Long story short: With my left leg, I stepped between the slump block side of the hill against which the dumpster sits, said hole being about a foot wide. With no place for my leg to stop, I sank to my crotch while watching my right leg, the knee joint of which would not hold me up, slowly give way until was in a split with my right leg splayed perpendicularly from my crotch and horizontally away from the hole and my leg below the knee canted at a good 45 degrees. Nothing snapped, but the knee was definitely torqued. Since that time, now about a week, I have been unable to put much weight on my right leg. This knee joint has been bugging me for months, moreso than ever with the chemo, behaving very arthritically. It gives out on me without notice. Now I really have to hold onto to something to rise. Disuse seems to exacerbate the knee which will hold to allow me to walk once I get going on it. But there are limits: I can't seem to go very far on it without tiring.
Add to this a couple other little facts: First, if anything I am noting what seems to be a sharpening of the pins and needles and pains of the peripheral neuropathy in my legs, including feet, ankles, and probably knees. Ditto a bit more in the arms and hands. And this week, I am back napping almost every afternoon. Conflating factors: I have been somewhat more active in the yard, weeding the tomatoes, sanding a couple of benches, mowing the weeds, also doing a little fishing. (That has been fine, per usual.) Add to this, it has been record hot, and I always slow down a little during summer. But overall, I think again that the neuropathy has ceased receding. I don't want to contemplate what that means. I have fallen off my exercise plan--that is probably part of this feeling more tired, too.
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