The week after surgery

So I decided to go back to work last week...dumb move.

Beside there being way too much to do compressed into the last week before the yearly University two week shut down I had knee surgery three days ago!

I went home at the end of Monday exhausted, and thinking 'only a few more days'. I went home Tuesday exhausted, and thinking 'I have to go back for that installation meeting in the morning'. I came home Wednesday for lunch and fell asleep for three hours.

God knew I was going to try to finish out the week so...on Thursday the University sent everyone home at lunch time because of the impending ice storm.

The ice storm happened but there wasn't any damage in our area and the roads were blessedly clear the next day because Friday I had an appointment at Johnson County Orthopedics to get my sutures out. So we were up early Friday and driving.

If you have never had the opportunity to watch someone pull metal staples out of your skin, it's pretty cool! They have this tool that is shaped like a mini sheet metal crimper that grips the center of the staple and presses it down between two prongs and curls the ends up and out of your skin. I had always wondered how they did that; now I know.

So, I walked into the appointment on crutches, and after the nurse and the doctor were finished with their work the Athletic Trainer came in. He told me to get rid of the crutches and the brace; said didn't need them, at least at home. So I've taken him at his word and it's been great.

The main reason for this blog post is to show you some pictures from the week after surgery...


You can see the three small holes around the knee cap for the orthoscope the meniscus repair, two on the right and one low on the left; the other two holes served multiple purposes: drilling holes in the bone to set the new ACL and getting hamstring tendons for the repair and whatever else, I'm not sure. All in all not very invasive considering what I've seen on others.

My bruising on the other hand is impressive to say the least, so without further adieu:



One of the reasons it's so bad is that they used a tourniquet during surgery to control blood lose.

The long and the short of it is that I'm healing, I'm walking, and I have a couple of weeks of vacation coming up filled with family time and great activities, and may be even some time alone with my sweetheart! I'm not jumping for joy...because it hurts, so I'm sitting with energy.

Merry Christmas.

I had a successful knee surgery on 11 Dec. The doctors fixed my ACL as planned but also fixed my MCL and cleaned up my Meniscus since there was a considerable amount of scar tissue; there was a lot of damage. All things considered the doctor told Amber that my knee would be better than most men's knees till the arthritis starts setting in twenty or so years from now.

Amber waited patiently the whole time amd drove us home afterword. She's wonderful.

Compaired to my previous general anesthetic experience this went very well...no nausia afterword, I was able to eat as soon as we got home without any problems, which was very nice since I had been fasting since the previous days lunch.

Goerge was a trooper the whole time, I think he slept the mjority of the time we were on the road. Uncharactoristically Amber did not have the camera with her so we don't have pictures of the facility, doctors, nurses, and before and after of the leg, I guess you will just have to imagine a really nice facility and lots of great poeple...and of course my beautiful leg with the middle third shaven and then wrapped quite tightly to cover the five little incisions they made to fix it up; hows that for a picture?!

Now a couple of days later I am feeling rather useless on the couch as I have a hard time completing my physical therepy excersizes or getting up to do anything else at all. Yesterday I had my first physical therepy appointment, which though somewhat painful, I thought went rather well. Chad (the therepist) was impressed that I could, the day after surgery, bend my leg more than 90 degrees and straighten it out to 0 degrees. The leg lifts are a little painful but the bending stuff really smarts every now and then.

That's life right now...eat, take pain pill, sleep a little, hold George, change the occational bum (not mine), excersize, eat, pain pill, sleep, repete. I'm going to try to go back to work Monday, I'm not sure how that will go, but I think I'll be glad of something else to do. We only have another week before the university shuts down for a couple of weeks for Christmas and New Years Day so I will have some unstructured recovery time and hope to make the best of it.

It would really nice to be walking after the first of the year; I think that is realistic. I go in next Friday to get my stitches and staples out we will see what the doctor says then.

Honesty in Political Advertising

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Mormon.org - The Restoration of Truth

Mormon.org - The Restoration of Truth

I love this very eloquent and simple testimony that the Lord's words never cease. It portrays my feelings and beliefs about revelation and an open cannon of scripture. The Lord loves us and will never leave us alone in the darkness of this world without the comfort of His never ceasing word.

Evolutionary Thought

What I think I am, what I think I was created to be, what I think I should be...

In the end it is only what I choose to be that matters.

I cannot think of a more simple synopsis of the meaning of life: thoughts and actions. I am made of that which is acted upon, but I am that which acts; I build, I begin, I create, I complete. I also dream, and imagine, and believe, and think, but the substance of these is in the action. Without action I am merely that which is acted upon.

Choice is the end of life, and the beginning; but if I do not choose I never live, I only exist.

Evolutionary theory has a new twist: self-determination. Self-determination recognizes that there is natural order in all things...snow flakes, lipids, genes, etc; when acted upon, everything changes to a more ordered state.

There is a wonderful step forward in this line if thinking, but the idea of a rock self-determining in the midst of a magma flow is quite absurd since the elements that compose the rock and every other kind of element for that matter have no self, they are not that which acts but that which is acted upon. So what does determine this order? Does it change? Are there exceptions? How did the order come to be? If we understand the workings of this order where does that lead? If we understand the workings of this order can we determine the end results? Can we change the results within the framework of this order? Points to ponder.

Family Vacation

On the 14 of June we arrived home from a long anticipated family vacation. We left home on the 29 of May en route to Denver Colorado for the Mason Family Reunion and arrived late in the afternoon. Grandpa Mason provided us and everyone else rooms in a posh hotel for three or four nights and we enjoyed being reacquainted with aunts, uncles, and cousins (and lots of second cousins at this point).

This is the over head picture of the pizza party we had on Saturday night, it was mostly Galbraith's, but then most of the family are Galbraith's, more than two thirds.

One of my favorite parts of the family reunion was staying up till two or three a.m. playing cards with Dad, Nathanael, and Ryan; we did that two nights running. It was fun to just relax, talk, and tell jokes and stories with them; it's kind of a tradition that Dad and I started at the first Mason Family Reunion in 1997.

We went to the Denver temple on Friday and that was the first time that I have been in the temple with all of my married siblings at the same time; eight of us are married now. We did a sealing session with Grandpa and the spirit and experience were great. I think that was the most poignant moment in the whole reunion for me except possibly the fast and testimony meeting we attended with Grandma and Grandpa on Sunday. I got up to bare testimony and testified about families in our Heavenly Father's Plan and paid tribute Chet and Mary Lou Mason as the great patriarch and matriarch of our family.

On Monday the 2 of June we packed up and headed for Utah and our great friends the DeMille's.

The reunion and vacation

From the 29th of May to the 14th of June we were on vacation. It was interesting, fun, challenging, beautiful, relaxing, energizing, educational, thought provoking, and deeply satisfying. I've posted on facebook some of the many pictures we took but here is one that deserves it's own post.

William DeMille let me tag along and help out with his bees. It was great fun and I learned a lot; specifically I learned why my brother Seth and I weren't successful at bee keeping as teens.

You have to open hives about once every two or three weeks and rotate the frames, check egg production including queen cells, honey stores, and if there is a good balance of drones and workers. You can actually shift frames along with population, eggs, honey and all to help strengthen a weak or struggling hive!

William also showed me a honey tree that he hived a swarm out of last year. He keeps watching in hopes of getting another swarm because the one he took last year is thriving.

Article comment post

Today I received an e-mail from a magazine Miller-McCune, they are printing a comment I made on an article called 'The Doubt Makers'.

Here's the link to both http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/348

The article is rather long and really not worth the read unless you are trying to understand conspiracy theorists from the far political left, so here is the comment I made:

POSTED BY: Mark Galbraith, May 21, 2008, 02:23 PM
"This article is insidious. It makes some assumptions that are simply untrue, namely that: scientists and reporters can establish objective truth; that this established truth is not subject to personal perspective or flawed data/data interpretation; that only one side of any argument has an agenda; and that consensus among experts means the truth has been found.

The problem is that all of these assumptions are untrue. The truth as we know it, as we search it out, is simply our best understanding and interpretation of the finite data we gather in a particular limited context. This truth is neither absolute nor pure, whether in relation to climate change, theories of evolution, gravity, black holes or any other scientific subject; the truth as we know it is just our best guess.

In science change is the only constant that can be held absolutely true. The second we come to consensus that any scientific subject is settled is the second we loose all hope of finding truth. Agendas are universal. Whether they are conscious or unconscious every person, every group of people, every organization, every government, every business, every media outlet, every entertainment venue, and every expert has an agenda. The agenda of this author seems clear in the message of the article: only the bad guys have an agenda, you can trust the media, scientists all agree and you should too…if you don’t you’re a bad guy!

Lastly, consensus among experts means the truth has been found…bologna! Truth is not a democracy! Truth is not limited by our understanding or perception of it or by the agreement of the few or the many that we have found and established it. We cannot define the truth, we can only search for and identify the pieces we find, and try to fit them into the great puzzle that in the end is put together according to our view of the world. Any true scientist will admit that science isn’t interested in the truth, science is only interested in finding the answers that prove a hypothesis, that reinforce a theory, that explain a law, so the grant money won’t dry up…back to the agenda. May be it’s time we get back to equal time and let people find their own answers; after all it’s not just reporters and scientists that are sifting to find them."

Pie Day in Maryville

The Maryville Branch pie day celebration (3.14 as in March 14th). What a great opportunity for all the guys to show...how crazy they are by eating a 9" cream pie in three minutes. This is not one of my greatest moments but I suppose it needs to go down in history anyway.

By the way...I won. Not sure what that says about me, but it was fun.

This video speaks for itself as Nathanael and I record a really fast time on the crooscut saw at the 2005 Nauvoo Pagent. This is brotherhood at it's best!

Busy Spring

This year seems to be accelerating dramatically in every respect. We will be having our sixth child...one closer to a really respectable family size. We will be taking our first real family vacation. Church and family activities seem to be multiplying and we can hardly keep up. To add insult to business my work is so chaotic and demanding that I can rarely get through a daily list without passing much of it forward to the next day.

Today Gabriella slunk into our room under a blanket as I was working on my laptop and handed me a little note that said "To Daddy, Havfun--Dear Daddy hav a good day tomoro. I like that song to. I wont you to know that I love you." I was listening to dance music and the girls especially like it because they dance. A song that I particularly like came on and I mentioned that I like it...it seems that little girls pay a lot of attention to what their daddys say, more than I thought they did.

The start of something...

Today I decided to start blogging. I'm not sure if this will work for my journaling needs but it has to be better than just writing in my phyical journal every thre or four months.

The world is so full of ideas, and I am so busy so much of the time that I miss much of the great thinking that is going on. Because of that I'm always scrambling to find my opinion and what the truth is about any given thought or idea. I do have my foundation, the things, ideas and beliefs that don't change but everything else seems to be in flux most of the time; I think the only way I could keep up would be to read and think and discuss with good minds 24/7; not a possibility.

There are lines that are being drawn amoung all these ideas that are clearly defining the next stage in the battle between good and evil. It is truely amazing to me that so few people are paying attention that most don't see it happening; but considering my own struggle to keep up and think and have an opinion I guess it's not a surprize.

That's a good start, we'll see where I go from here!