Left-over Turkey Recipe

This recipe calls for chicken, but I substituted turkey and it turned out yummy. Makes enough for 8.

 

1/2 lb. penne pasta (I used farfalle as I had half a box of it in the cupboard)

1 T. olive oil

1 cup chopped onion

1 orange bell pepper, chopped

1/2 lb. fresh mushrooms, chopped

1 (10-oz.) pkg. washed baby spinach

1 T. dried tarragon

1 tsp. paprika

2 c. cooked chicken meat, skinned, boned and bite-sized (I used my left-over turkey)

1 (10 3/4 oz.) can cream of chicken soup

1 c. grated Cheddar cheese

2 c. small curd cottage cheese

1/2 c. grated Parmesan cheese (2 oz.)

In a large pot, bring 4 quarts of water to a boil. Cook the pasta according to package directions, about 8 minutes. Drain. Meanwhile, in a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion, bell pepper and mushrooms to skillet. Sauté for 3-4 minutes. Add the spinach, tarragon, and paprika. Cook until most of the liquid has evaporated, about 5 minutes. (The spinach will wilt.) Stir together the chicken (turkey) pieces with the soup and the 3 cheeses. Spritz a 9 x 13-inch glass baking dish with cooking spray. Layer drained pasta, then sautéed vegetables, then chicken (turkey)/cheese mixture on top. Bake in preheated 350 degree oven until bubbly and brown, 45 to 60 minutes. Enjoy.

 

Foot Note

I thought I would update you on my progress with my surgical foot. My husband has looked at it a few times, and he always says it looks bad, and he doesn’t mean that in a slangy way. Not much of an encourager, but a hard worker as he does so many household chores to keep us humming along. It has been a little over 4 1/2 weeks. The deep purples are turning greenish yellow, the last of the steri-strips came off today, and the swelling is less. I do have a little bit of pain which ups a notch when I do my therapy exercises.

         

The therapist has me mostly doing the exercises on my own at home. There are just 3 simple exercises to increase up and down flexibility. My second session he measured and told me my back ankle movement has gone from 5 (degrees?) to 10. So there has been some improvement. 15 is considered normal. I won’t see the therapist again until January 9th, the day after seeing the surgeon. If all goes well, we will be able to add some other therapies involving more movement. I had been hoping to be rid of the boot, but Aaron (the therapist) told me Dr. Karr usually has his patients stay in the boot as they put weight on the foot. I hit a “wall” last weekend and just didn’t want to deal with the whole boot and knee walker business any more, but of course I do want the foot to heal so continued on.

Thursday night I noticed some lower back and butt pain. I had cooked most of the evening meal myself and maybe overdid? Or maybe I hurt it some when getting out of a chair? Friday the pain was bad enough I had a tough time using my knee walker without being in pain. I switched from Tylenol to Aleve and today I feel good.

Tomorrow I will go to church again and out to eat. I don’t get out of the house much, though, as it is a lot of work. We went out to breakfast yesterday, but my back was killing me. I have to be patient and wait for things to heal.

Still Not Enrolled for Health Insurance

Finally selected a plan and went through the steps to enroll. I got to the place to click confirm, and I got an error message. It told me to log out and try again. I have done that 4 times with no success. After lunch I will try again, and if still no success will call the help line. I guess it is still going to be a struggle to get insurance. I had hoped my troubles were behind me.

Christmas Wishes

 

Wishing you a blessed and joyful Christmas.

 

I will have an early gift tonight, one not under the tree. For the first time in a month, I can sleep with an unencumbered foot. No more heavy boot. Snow is expected overnight into tomorrow though only about an inch. We will have a white Christmas.

Healthcare.gov Works Now!

I checked a few weeks ago, and my account on healthcare.gov had a clickable button to remove my “completed” application and start over again. The good thing about that is that I did not have to verify my identity again. Thursday I received the results of my over-the-phone application in the mail. Several mistakes plus I needed to send documentation to verify my income. They showed my husband buying insurance though he is on Medicare and not eligible.

I decided to go back online and use the remove button. I had been planning to wait until after December 23rd as I thought the website would be busy and hard to access. I got right on. Wow! What a difference. The new application process went smoothly and fast. They had even changed the wording of a few questions that removed some ambiguity. One choice was to allow them to link your application to income verification at the IRS by providing Social Security numbers. I did that, and when my eligibility results arrived online I did not need to provide any more documentation. There was a button to view the available health insurance plans for my area.

I am still comparing the plans. I will probably enroll by the end of next week. We will see if that part of the site works OK. Since my current insurance expiration was extended to February 1st, I do have time to think about which plan will work and to work thru any bugs in the enrollment process.

Too bad it took so long for the government to get a decent site up and running. If it had been in this shape in October, their enrollment figures would be higher and fewer people would have been stressed out.

 

 

Knitting Lessons

I mentioned prior to my surgery that I was going to teach myself to knit. The dishcloth pattern on the internet had a video, but I knew that would not be very viewable on my Nook which I was using the first two weeks while my foot had to be elevated. I used a booklet I received probably 20 plus years ago to help me remember what I had seen on the internet re basic knitting.

Actually, this gift included some yarn and a pair of knitting needles, and I knitted a few practice swatches but didn’t make anything. My memory of that experience was positive; I felt pretty sure I would enjoy knitting. This time I wanted something I could use. Besides ending up with a dishcloth, the goals were to not go stir crazy and to take my focus off of my foot. It worked wonderfully.

 Unfortunately, I ran into some problems. I made a mistake and didn’t know how to fix it. This was during my 3rd start and I was pretty far along; I finally decided it would still be useable as a dishcloth, flaws and all. My binding off definitely doesn’t look good. This dishcloth had a special effect around the edges. It required me to do a yarn over plus the first few stitches I had to follow a pattern before knitting to the end of the row. Those tasks were new to me. There was only knitting, no purling so I will have to find a different project to relearn that. I found I liked least knitting two together.

Since I had some yarn left over, I decided to make a second cloth to reinforce what I had learned. I surmised I had less than half the yarn I used in the first cloth so I made this cloth slightly smaller. You can see in the photo the “end tail”; it was a close call.

                                                                   Second dishcloth

Again I had some trouble binding off. I guess I need an instructor, not just a book. I definitely will need an instructor to move on to more difficult projects, learning about gauge and how to use more than one ball of yarn, fix problems, etc. I still need to find a crochet hook to weave the “tails” in.

 Yes, I enjoyed the experience enough to continue. My second cloth went more quickly. I never became a speed demon, but there was a nice rhythmic flow that was kind of soothing.

I bought this book at Half-Price Books for $2 ( discount bargain section) that has several scarves that interest me.

 

As I knitted, I couldn’t help but see parallels to the Christian life. God has purposes for us and can use us with our flaws. However, sin has consequences which can go on for some time. I had hoped when I started a new row of knitting, the “mistake” would remain in the previous row, but it continued. About midway, I learned about knitting two together and decided to see if that would help my flawed place. It worked, but I don’t know why. Just as I found I need an experienced knitter to get me thru the hard times, Christians need one another with our different gifts and backgrounds to advance in our Christian walk.

 3 more weeks until I can slowly start bearing weight on my operated right foot. There will be more extensive physical therapy then, too. The knitting experiment did help the time go by.

Snowflakes

I am always amazed at the diversity, intricacy, and beauty of individual snowflakes. We have lots of the white stuff here today. You can see more in this slideshow .

Peroneal Tendon Surgery

As of yesterday, I no longer have to elevate my foot all the time. That means I can now sit at the computer more easily. I still cannot put any weight on my right foot for another 4 weeks. Treasure your feet. Damage that takes only a moment to inflict takes months to fix, especially if surgery is required. I tore my peroneus brevis tendon on June 21st. Of course I and for that matter my doctors did not know that for sure until exploratory surgery on November 26th. The MRI did not show the damage. The foot surgeon knew his stuff though and predicted that there would be a tear in the peroneus brevis tendon. He was right. Such tears are usually longitudal, i.e., they are more like a split that goes lengthwise, not a rupture of the tendon.

 The surgery was day surgery and took only about an hour to perform. They gave me some kind of epidural, then the la-la-land juice. I was told that they would do a nerve block down near the knee and my whole right leg would be numb after surgery and for up to 18 hours afterward. Because of fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis I usually don’t have good quality sleep. When I awoke after the surgery, I felt so rested. I had been oblivious of any pain in my body. I had purchased a knee walker for my recovery period, but because of the numb leg I had to use a folding aluminum frame walker until the day after surgery. I thought it was a real waste of money, but now I think it may come in handy later when I start putting weight on my foot slowly over time. I knew I was too much of a klutz to use crutches.

Knee walker

 

The nurse who called to set up the surgery date and inform me of pre-op steps was very firm about not wearing denim or twill pants to the surgical facility. I needed something stretchy, perhaps knit workout pants. When you look at the Jones dressing/splint I had after surgery, you understand why the clothing had to fit over a bulky mass.

Jones dressing

The first week I spent mostly in bed. The first 72 hours I had an icing contraption that had to run 2 hours, then off 2 hours, then back on for 2 hours, etc. It was kind of noisy and didn’t contribute to sleeping well. I also was taking pain meds every 4 hours. The ice machine looked like a drink cooler with tubes coming out the back end which connected to tubes coming out of my dressing and an on/off switch. The ice/water combination inside had to be changed about every 6 hours to keep the temperature around 40-50 degrees. There was a temperature gauge down where the  tubes entered the Jones dressing. What was underneath the dressing was a mystery. When they took the dressing off 10 days post-op I saw that there was a little sleeve that fastened around my whole foot with velcro and the tubes attached to the sleeve. The cold water circulated around my foot.

                             You can see the tubes (actually 2 of them) that poked out of the dressing

 The pain wasn’t too bad on the hydrocodone with tylenol. I tested for feeling in my leg that first night when I would wake to take meds, turn on/off the ice machine. When I woke at 5 a.m. I realized I could wriggle my toes and feel my thigh. The numbness was mostly gone. Unfortunately, pain meds do have side effects. I had some nausea which I could control with promethazine most of the time. I also had some constipation. Sunday night (day 6) I decided not to set the alarm for the night dose of pain med, and I slept thru to the next morning with only a slight elevation of pain. I switched to extra-strength tylenol and have done well on that with the nausea and constipation going away. I also started sitting in a recliner chair in the living room. It was a good turning point.

 10 days after surgery, the dressing was removed. I had my first look at my post-op foot. I guess it is a good thing that the foot is some distance from the eyes. I thought it looked pretty good, but today I took some photos and there is a lot more bruising than I realized. However, the PA thought the foot and the incision looked very good. That was encouraging. A fiberglass cast was put on my foot which I wore for a little over 5 days. The Jones dressing and the cast could not get wet. I used a tall kitchen garbage bag with a pull cinch top over my leg to shower. My husband wrapped some clear wrapping plastic around the top to seal it. I sat on my bath bench turned sideways with my surgical leg propped on the tub ledge and covered with the shower curtain. Awkward, but it worked. I did have some sore spots from leaning on the knee walker with a cast on.

 

                      Cast; stretched a men’s large sock over the toes to try to keep them warm

 I did not have itching with my cast. I had read somewhere to use a hair dryer to blow air down a cast since you are not supposed to put anything down there to scratch. Contrary to popular thought, putting a clothes hanger down your cast is not a good idea.

Yesterday they took out the stitches. I now am wearing the CAM boot I wore prior to surgery. Since I have to wear it even to bed, I am now using my garbage bags over my boot to keep my linens clean. The only time I can take the boot off is to shower or for physical therapy which I start next Monday. Today I had my first shower with the right foot inside the tub. It was tiring to keep the foot lifted up from the tub bottom. I was sitting on the bath bench. I wonder if I should try standing with the foot lifted. I did have to take the boot off last night. I went to take my twill pants off for bedtime, and I could not get it off over the boot. The pants had fit over the cast and of course I had them on when they removed the cast and put on the boot. So my hope of diversifying my wardrobe once again has to be thought through carefully. If I have my husband help me take the boot off and back on, maybe I can wear pants inside the boot as I did previously. It is rather painful to take the boot off and put it on when I am doing it myself. My foot has a ways to go before being tender and hurting when unsupported. It also looks more swollen. I need to do more elevating again.

Incisions out; can now shower. Some of the orange glow remains from the iodine concoction they swabbed the foot with.

Not sure what this purple is on the inside of the foot. It doesn’t hurt much. Maybe they clamped the foot? The purple x is also meaningless to me. They had me write yes with a purple pen on the outside of the right foot and then the doctor was also to initialize it to make sure we were on the same page re foot to be operated on. The anesthesiologist also had to initial behind my right knee showing we were in agreement on which leg to numb.

 I am expecting some increased pain as I start physical therapy. I have 4 weeks of just up and down movements. The tendons glide when the foot is moved, and scar tissue needs to be broken up and then kept from reforming so they will glide smoothly. After I get the boot off, there will be 4 more weeks of physical therapy range-of-motion and strengthening exercises. I am not sure yet how weight-bearing takes place. From what I have read, I think I will only put partial weight, not full weight, to begin. A long journey ahead, but hopefully I will have a normal foot again.