Still doing well

Wednesday will be six weeks from the surgery.  I am not pain free, but the lower back pain continues to get better and the left leg/buttock pain is still gone!! I walked 3 miles this morning without pain and when I got back I felt full of energy and vacuumed out the garage, which had accumulated a lot of leaves and spiders. Then, I felt tired.  I go to the doctor's next Monday and will see what he wants me to do.  He had said something about exercises to strengthen the core again.

Meanwhile, please remember back to late last year when I commented on my dental problems.  I had a tooth that had been giving me a problem for a couple of years that was finally discovered to have a chronic abcess that had destroyed the bone surrounding the roots and even penetrated into my sinus on the right.  Well the tooth was extracted and the periodontist put some "powdered bone" from a cadaver into the cavity to try and get my bone to grow back and provide a place for an implant.  Well, last Thursday I went back to see how things were progressing.  It had been 3 months from the extraction.  The x-ray looked ok, he said, and so he put in an implant, which looks kind of like a nail, into the gap where the extraction had been done.  But he said that there still needed to be more bone in there to support it before a crown is made.  In order to do that, he had to drill into the gum and use some sort of tool to raise the floor of the sinus so that he could shove in more powdered bone.  So that has all been done and now we wait for several more months.  Post-op I had some pain, but not too bad.  But I had a fair amount of swelling on the right side from the cheek bones to the lower jaw.  I looked a little like a lopsided chipmunk.  Today the swelling is much better and I no longer scare the children.  I go back next week to get the stitches out of my mouth.

After a lifetime of avoiding surgery, I am gradually becoming a bionic man.