About nine months ago I had a full knee replacement, on my right knee.

I feel that at this point, I’m between 85-90% healed.

I have my doubts about reaching 100% by the 12 month mark, but you never know.

One of the milestones that I reached last week was the ability to squat all the way down. I’m really excited about that. That’s something that I’ve missed being able to do since November of 2020, when I tore my meniscus. I squat down all the damned time, to clean the litterboxes, to pet the cat, to pick up something off the floor.

Am I 100% able to squat? Well, no. It’s a bit painful. I’m not compressing the still healing knee as much as the other, so my hips are angled. Etc.

But the pose is almost there, and that makes me happy. It means that now I can start loosening up my toes again. My right foot has a bunion on it. I need to stretch out the ball of that foot (a lot!) so that I can go up on my toes and have it not be painful. Again, working on it, and getting there.

The three things that really need to heal, that I’m tracking against being 100% are:

• My knee is still painful to the touch. It isn’t nearly as bad. But it’s still sore.
• I still can’t kneel very well (see pain, above). I practice it daily on my bed. If I’m careful, I can kneel and it can just be slightly achy. If I move around at all, particularly putting weight on the outside of my knee, I get sharp, needle pains through the area. Not good.
• From the knee down, part of the top of my leg is still numb. The numbness has slowly been retreating. It no longer reaches midcalf thoug. It just goes a few inches under my knee. But my PT told me that would take a year before it went away, so I’m hopeful that it will actually mostly be gone by the 12 month mark.

The pain and the kneeling? We’ll see.

I’m easily able to walk 10,000 steps a day. I don’t, and I haven’t been keeping that up. Mostly I’m getting about 8K per day, and that is going to have to be good enough, particularly since I’ve been so busy.

Starting next week, I’m going to refocus on walking and eating, as I’m a little heavy at this point and the steps will help with the weight. Again, not going to do anything about it this week. Too much going on.

Last week, wrote two short stories. This week, gonna do that again. I kept saying that I had a bunch of stories due, and I thought I had actually written down that list somewhere. But now I can’t find it, and I can only figure out four out of six stories that are due.

And I have other things due today that I will get to. But now, onto the fiction!