The pain has lessened and Jon, despite his restrictions and the occasional discomfort, is pretty happy. He sleeps in his bedroom, and I carry him downstairs for the day’s events. He sits in an armchair with his zimmered legs on an ottoman.

His legs have to be in the zimmers pretty much full time for the first two weeks, so aside from showering and a bit of range physio, there he is. With the help of a makeshift tray and a new small table, Jon can enjoy his meals there, as well as all of his usual vices: The Weather Network, LeapPad, videos, PlayStation and computer. The universe more or less revolves around him in this configuration, which is probably a really bad precedent. 🙂

Jon’s already rolling around in bed on his own, though sometimes he needs help in the middle of the night stacking/balancing the zimmers if he wants to sleep on his side. Pain medication is still necessary at night, but not so crucially. We attempted an experiment with Tylenol 8-hour, which purports to serve up two 325mg doses of Tylenol in a row in one pill. Jon woke up at the 4 hour 20 minutes mark with pain (but nothing another dose of Tylenol didn’t fix). Richard just did a little digging for and found:

88% of the total amount of drug is released into the system within the first three hours! This is perhaps not as bad as it sounds, because you have to remember that once the drug is released, it still has a 1-4 hour half life. Still, there’s a lot more drug in the serum during the first 4 hours than during the 2nd 4 hours of the 8 hour period the extended-release formulation is supposed to cover.

So, Jon is not nuts. The extended-release formulation is not what it’s cracked up to be.

Thanks, Richard.

So back to setting the alarm clock for every four hours.

And coping with pressure sores. As usual, if you more or less immobilize somebody, no matter how you cover or pad their bonds, there will be a pressure point. The clever folks at the hospital thought we could protect Jon a bit by using his AFO’s (his regular orthotics that stretch his Achilles tendon), but in practise somehow the AFO made a particular point on the zimmer worse. So now Jon has a nasty sore spot on his right Achilles tendon area, and it’ll be really hard to get rid of until the zimmers are off for good.

But otherwise Jon is happy, and clever enough to try to avoid school homework, like reading or creative writing. And given that he ate 1/2 of a medium-sized pizza last night, his appetite is back too.