Mangled stump

Two posts in a single day, go me πŸ™‚

Anywho, apart from my musings on February, I also wanted to post about the joys of being an amputee and random, sporadic wounds on my stump. I went to bed on Tuesday night this week without any problems, then woke up on Wednesday morning with an absolute cracker of an infected sore on my stump. This isn’t necessarily anything unusual by itself, it’s just annoying. I think a lot of these instances are caused by infected hair follicles or in-grown hairs, both of which are apparently pretty common amongst amputees. The reason behind them as I understand it is due to the nature of the situation – the stump’s generally wrapped in a non-porous material (in my case, a sheath of silicon that acts as a membrane between my stump and the socket), you get sweaty over the course of the day (exasperated at this point in time by the Australian summer heat), and being a guy and having hairy man legs (is this too much information at this point??), something’s got to give πŸ˜› If I get them in random spots on the leg it’s not too dramatically bad, but when I get them along the areas that support my weight around the socket (typically around the top of the socket and at the very base), it can be extremely painful. Imagine a crazy blind pimple on the ball and heel of your foot, that’s what it feels like.

Thankfully, I was able to drain most of the crap out of it first thing in the morning and went home from work early to take the leg off, keep the wound clean and rest up. I woke up yesterday morning, and my body being the surprising thing it is, healed up most of it, to the point where I didn’t need to bring my walking stick around the office yesterday, which was awesome.

The bummer about it is that I was due to train the night I got knocked with the sore, so I had to bail on the session. Considering how damn good last week’s training was (I was drenched with sweat afterwards, and it was a very rewarding and focused session), I was really looking forward to jumping around in my gi again.

Ah well, I guess there’s always next week!

I know this is still early days with the blog, but hopefully the above might prove useful to other amputees out there who get issues like this with their stumps, either as a general rule, or in exacerbating conditions, like the hot weather.

Well, might finish this one up – I’m planning on adding some blogs in the next couple of weeks to fill in the substantial gap between September 2007 and February 2009, so look out for those. It’s been a good time for training though, and (hopefully!) I’ve been improving my technique as I go. I’m planning on looking into remote blogging down the road to simplify things further, but we’ll see how I go – I’m hoping it’ll encourage more regular blogging, but I probably won’t look into the technicalities of setting it up for a couple of weeks at this stage.

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February – the ‘F’ is for ‘fat’ :P

Hmmm, February hasn’t exactly been the most ideal month for training purposes and generally keeping slim πŸ˜› It’s been a real double-whammy – it was super hot over the last month, which threw out doing much in the way of training at home, as my shed (which is where all my training gear is kept) was normally 5 – 10 degrees hotter than the outside temperature, which for a few good runs there would have put it around 50 degrees. I’m a bit stupid with some things, but even I have my limits, and I don’t trust myself doing a weights session in that kind of heat πŸ˜›

In addition, because of the heat you’re more likely to have yummy stuff like ice blocks, slushies and ice cream to keep cool πŸ™‚ Well, at least I do. The combo of a bit of indulgence over the last month (in addition to a fair whack of entertaining and going out for dinner, as one does during summer) and a lack of regular training has meant that my muscle mass has decreased a bit and my belly is looking a little more prominent than I’d like πŸ˜›

So, March is going to be a fresh start – the weather’s getting a bit more consistent with the temperature (it’ll probably hover in the 30s for the next couple of weeks, but that’s definitely fine for training; its the 42+ degrees that I don’t like), and I get the feeling our hectic schedule might slow down for a bit, giving me time to be able to fit in more training. Will post on how I progress!

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IE6 problems now fixed

If you’re still using a rubbish browser like IE6, you’ll be pleased to know that the site now displays correctly on your 9 year old POS browser πŸ™‚ It wasn’t all that complicated, it just involved some hacks to compensate for IE’s out of date box model as far as CSS goes. For nerdy types, Wikipedia has an entry on it here.

For the most part, the site runs fine on IE6 now – the only differences are the lack of alpha-blending on PNGs and the image galleries are all single-column instead of two columns.

If you find any more bugs, let me know. As an alternative, you could always migrate to a standards-compliant brower like Firefox πŸ˜‰

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Oops, its broken in IE6 :P

Just tried out the site in IE6 – its totally borked. Stupid Microsoft and its stupid box model. If you’re viewing this in IE6, erm… use another browser, like Firefox or Google Chrome or something πŸ˜› I’ll try and fix the css soon, but in the meantime, use a browser that’s actually standards compliant πŸ˜› That’s my excuse anyways.

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… I think I’m done :P

It’s 1am, I totally need to go to bed πŸ˜›

Anywho, looks like I’ve finished wrapping up the remaining stuff I wanted to do – image galleries are up with a nice little drop-down menu (works in FF3, not sure about other browsers yet), About page is up to date and all my previous blog posts have made it over. The only thing missing is getting the image titles and captions working with the plugins. I’ll sort that out over the next couple of weeks if I remember to get off my arse and check it out πŸ˜›

So, welcome to my blog. Hopefully it won’t suck πŸ™‚

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