Rain and Disappointing Imaging

I took this yesterday in the parking lot of Fred Meyer.  They're owned by the Kroger chain, and have positioned themselves as a low cost grocer.  Hah!  Double Hah Hah Hah!  Safeway charges $4.99 for the big box of corn flakes, Fred Meyer charges a dollar more for the same thing.  On another note, why does cereal cost so much?  It's not like there's a corn shortage.  Anyway, check out the sky, the clouds, and the obscured mountain tops.  In the bottom of the photo, we see three Teslas, plugged in to charging stations.  It was interesting, each car had someone sitting in it, working on a lap top.  I guess they needed to top off the batteries before heading home.

We went to the Renton Planet Fitness to avoid the rain.  I like the one in Tucson better, but Renton is not terrible.

The climate today was better.  After a morning spent making necessary but annoying phone calls, we headed out for the three mile walk.  It was pleasant, unlike the the poor suffering eastern half of the country.  Look at the color on this plant.  It looks fake, but it's not.  It's really red.

 

July 3, Jim and I had the yearly appointment with the doctors.  Then we both went and had hip x-rays.  My left hip has been more painful than usual as of late.  Jim's right thigh hurts a lot; it started about mid-May and has become steadily worse.  Our first thought was that we were both driving up on hip replacements.  Jim's pain is on the side where he pushed his femur through his acetabulum in 2006; we've always expected a hip replacement would be in the cards.  My hip has been bad for about ten years.  Nope!  No arthritis for me, and almost none for Jim. So no hip replacements.

July 12 we both had MRIs; mine on my hip and Jim's on his spine.  These were not so good.  I have a torn labrum.   Here is a link to an article about Lady Gaga's labral tear.  I knew you'd want to know.  The labrum is a rim of soft tissue or fibrocartilage that surrounds the acetabulum (hip socket). The labrum adds to the stability of the hip by deepening the socket and protects the joint surface. It can tear.  It can be repaired surgically, but the surgeons don't like to do it on people over 40, because they assume you'll just turn around and get a hip replacement.  As you can imagine, this just irritates the living snot out of me.  At present I'm limited to about four miles before the hip starts screaming.  If I can convince someone to repair this at my advanced age, I'm deferring it until we're back in Tucson.  It's been bad for awhile, it'll keep.

Jim has yet another bulging disk.  This is not nearly as dire as in 2017.  Back then he had the moving disk and the double nerve crush at L4 and L5 which required spinal fusion to fix.  This time, it's a bulge at L2/L3.  The GP thinks it can be fixed with a laminectomy.  But first there must be an epidural injection with cortisone to see if that will fix it.  I have zero hope for that, but they have an established process so we have to do this first.  We're hoping to see the surgeon shortly after the epidural so we can get on the surgery schedule so we can get this thing fixed and get out of Dodge before October.  I miss my house!  From my reading of the interwebs, this is not a trivial procedure but should not be as bad as the spinal fusion.  That was awful.  The purpose of the surgery is to remove part of the vertebra to make some space for the bulging disk so it quits pressing on the nerve.  This nerve is the one that enervates the outside of the thigh, and is currently giving Jim fits.  There will be some moving away of muscle to get to the bone, so there will be some amount of pain involved with this.

We didn't take good enough notes in 2017, so I have decided to write early and write often so that if we have need of this information in the future, we'll have it available.  There's a lot of stuff I just can not remember, and neither can Jim.  As we know, the blog functions as external storage for my terrible memory.