Tuesday rolls round and as my partner goes to work I rouse myself and take my vitals, all good there. After checking my socials and messages I get and take my morning meds whilst doing my physio exercises for my hand which is feeling better. With the kitchen cleared I am off to the local pub for breakfast/brunch. Collecting a paper on the way I settle down at a table and order my Spanish Hash and a hot chocolate. I like to be in different places to write letters so I use a page from my journal and set about slowly writing a letter to a friend. I can write with my operated on hand but slowly and only in capitals. This is a hang over from my university days when I took all my notes in capitals and then typed them up when I went home, it was the only way could know that I would be able to read them later. My food was good and when finished I was in for a pleasant surprise, my drink was free as I had ordered my food before 11:30am. A small but lovely win for the day.

Once home I found envelopes and stamps and prepared to send my letter. I settled down to do the crosswords of the day. One of them turned out to be quite tricky due to what I think was a mis leading picture component to the clue. As I puzzled away the window cleaners arrived and proceeded to run their clever extending sponge on a hose pole over the windows. Not a ladder in sight these days, they were soon on their way having taken advantage of being able to park on the new drive and I returned to the crosswords. There then followed a period of what I can only call life admin. All those bits and pieces that need doing but have no interest value to anyone, but by the time I was through them it was time to wander over to the Posy Office to send my letter and buy a sandwich for an afternoon snack and begin to draft the blog.

I am becoming impatient to see what my hand looks like with out the stitches and how quickly I can jettison any form of dressing apart from my night finger splint. It will be at this point I will be able to share my post operation scar and most importantly resume training on the rower. I feel itchy inside to get going again and need to get started on my own recover plan. I am still encumbered by needing to shower with my hand in a gaffer taped sandwich bag to keep my dressing dry and all the other little adventures that having a bandaged hand means I have to undertake. My hand is restless to be free as it can wriggle and do a lot of things already. At the moment it feels like a boxers taped hand waiting to be laced into the fighting gloves and eager to get on with it. Occasionally I get a burning sensation in part of the incision line but it quickly passes. More persistent is the tingling numbness in the extremities of my fingers, which I was warned might happened but should over time recover, although this is not guaranteed. This is another reason I want to get free of my bandage so I can get my hand doing all the normal things it would do to see if I can speed up the return of normal feeling in my finger tips . I seem to have recovered normal movement. I think the numbness is due to a form of nerve bruising which is going to take time to work through, although I have no idea if beating them on a keyboard is waking them up or constantly putting them back to sleep again.

This evening there is a big football match on which I hope to watch. I like sport but I may have to cut down on it, all my news feeds are crammed with sports stuff driven by whatever algorithms I am plugged into, or rather what algorithms are plugged into me. I am seriously considering a period of sports fasting (except six nations rugby) and replacing it with something more brain feedery ( my made up word) and seeing how long it take to adapt what comes through in what I am being fed by my cyber feeds. I am also becoming advert intolerant, I find them insulting and patronising, more to the point taking up more and more of the time of what I watch on television. The BBC of course does not do adverts but so much of the programming is crap, like Pointless, The One Show and East Enders. Even the Graham Norton Show is a disguised advertising platform. This probably sounds snobby but I get an increasingly strong sense that life is too short to be putting up with the crap I do not like. The solution lays with me I know so perhaps I need to choose my activities more carefully and pick ones that are more brain food than processed cyber pulp. Its not like there is a shortage of books and other stuff to do. So as from tonight I shall try to change my diet and hopefully feel the benefit.