Thursday, February 26, 2009

Shouldering the load

Well, not really.  But I must say that my rotator cuff is doing much, much better these days.

A month out, range of motion in several axes is nearly back to normal.  There’s some discomfort, a feeling of pinching, even a bit of pain at times, however.  I may be be getting to within a few degrees of normal range, but it’s not the effortless don’t-even-think-about-it movement I’d ordinarily make.  While some movements are getting back toward normality, others are still pretty limited.  Raising my arm to the side produces some fairly bad pinching as I approach 90 degrees, i.e., straight out. 

You may recall that one of my therapeutic goals was to pull back my hair as part of the process of placing an elastic for my ponytail.  Well, I did that, with difficulty, late last week.  But my shoulder ached for the rest of the day, so I didn’t try it again until this week.  Much better the second time around, though it still requires inordinate effort and produces a good bit of discomfort while I’m doing it.

What remains significantly affected is strength.  During my weekly physical therapy sessions, I find it astonishing how much more difficult an exercise becomes when I try it with a weight ... even a one pound weight!  Really, it’s an entirely different experience.  Even without weights, my exercises become difficult toward the end of a session.  How can it be that after simply lifting my arm nine times, the tenth time it’s shaking from the effort?

Quite a few simple tasks remain difficult.  For instance, I ordinarily do the push-down-and-twist on pill bottles with my left hand, holding it with my right.  Not now, however.  I’ve gotten to the point of holding the bottle in my left hand while opening it with the right, which is a whole lot better than it was for the first two weeks.  Back then, all I could do with my left hand was hold the bottle steady on the counter while opening it with the other hand.  And I couldn’t raise the left hand to my mouth to take the pills at first.

Thankfully, I’m well beyond that.  But, for example, I haven’t yet tried to boil a pot of water for spaghetti, because I’m still not sure I could carry it from the stove to the sink to drain it.  That’s not something to do one-handed!

I just scheduled myself for another four weeks of PT.  My therapist is fairly optimistic, given the progress I’ve made thus far, that I might be able to continue my healing without professional guidance after that.  Not that I’ll be 100% OK by then, she warns.  But I’ll be close enough to keep working on improvement on my own.

I hope so.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Presidential vote by LD (election analysis part 3)

After a too-long break, largely due to the injury described here and here, we’re back with what’s probably the analytic table of the widest interest of any that I’ll present in this series on the 2008 election in King County.  We’re going to look at the presidential results, subdivided by the county’s 17 (13 complete, four partial) Legislative Districts.

For reference, you’ll find a map displaying the locations of King County’s LDs in Part 2 of this series.  Alternatively, you can display King County’s .pdf version of the map by clicking here (you’ll want to do some serious resizing if you want to see the whole thing at once).

As we saw in my previous post in this series on the 2008 election, a total of 930,038 ballots were cast last November by King County residents.  On 2,946 of those ballots, the voter did not choose to cast a vote for a presidential candidate.  Conversely, 635 King County voters cast “overvotes” for president, placing marks in two or more of the choices.  The remaining 99.61% of the ballots displayed valid presidential votes—922,032 for one of the tickets on the ballot, and 4,425 write-ins.  We also saw that King County’s overall voter turnout was 83.9%, superb by national standards but a full percentage point lower than that recorded in the rest of the state of Washington.

The table below shows turnout and presidential results for the Legislative Districts in King County.  The LDs are listed in descending order of registered-voter count, with the 13 LDs entirely within the county shown first, followed by the four partial LDs (indicated by the asterisks next to their labels).  In each column, I’ve italicized the highest count or percentage.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Shared and shared alike

If there exists a shared date of birth more impressive than the one that took place exactly two hundred years ago today, I’ve never heard about it.  At The Mount, the large Georgian home in Shrewsbury, West Midlands, built by his father, Charles Robert Darwin was born on the twelfth of February, 1809.  He was the fifth of Robert and Susannah (Wedgwood) Darwin’s six children.  On the very same day, February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln, second child and first son of Thomas and Nancy (Hanks) Lincoln, drew his first breaths in a crude one-room log cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky.  Happy bicentennial, gentlemen!

With all the hoopla and celebration of this momentous coincidence we’re seeing right now, there’s no need for me to add my own two cents (Lincoln pennies, of course).  The worldwide influence and renown of Lincoln and Darwin remains strong, well over a century since their deaths.  Instead, I want to talk about shared birthdates.

To suggest that there has never been a more impressive accident of birth on the same day should imply that someone has done a search for such coincidences.  To my knowledge, not very much has been said about it.  Googling same birthdate, one finds a lot of links to pages where you can look for artists or musicians or whatever who share your birthday (but not necessarily birthdate ... same day, same year).  There are also links to the birthday problem exercise in probability.  Luckily, the #2 link is for FamousBirthdays.com, where the “by date” frame displays a sorted list of the birthdates of several thousand people.  Within that long list, I found over 100 shared birthdates of at least a small bit of interest.  There were, in fact, more than that, but I had no idea who the individuals were.

Reviewing the pairs (and even a few trios), I saw quite a variety.  Some of the pairs were, shall we say, cognitively dissonant.  Margaret Thatcher and Lenny Bruce, Al Gore and Rhea Perlman, Hubert Humphrey and Vincent Price, Lynne Cheney and David Crosby, Madeleine Albright and Trini Lopez, Rudy Giuliani and Gladys Knight, Greta Garbo and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Ray Kroc and Larry Fine (of the Three Stooges), and the topper, IMHO—Mike Ditka and Lee Harvey Oswald.

It’s odd to see people for whom I have widely divergent mental images joined by a common birthdate.  Consider, perhaps, Nomar Garciaparra and Monica Lewinsky, Jimmy Hoffa and Mel Allen, Marilyn Monroe and Andy Griffith, Condoleezza Rice and Yanni, Federico Fellini and DeForest Kelley, Anouk Aimée and Casey Kasem.  On the other hand, some pairs are remarkably convergent—hockey Hall of Famers Patrick Roy and Mario Lemieux, John Hughes and Cybill Shepherd, Matthew Broderick and Rosie O’Donnell, Albert Finney and Glenda Jackson, Tommy Lee Jones and Oliver Stone, Eminem and Wyclef Jean, Neil Diamond and Aaron Neville, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Herschel Walker, Daryl Hannah and Julianne Moore, Edward Norton and Christian Slater.  For some reason, George W. Bush and Sylvester Stallone seem sort of similar too.

Then there are the trios.  Pam Grier and Philip Michael Thomas share their birthdate with Hank Williams Jr.  Divine, John Lithgow, and Jeannie C. Riley were born on the same day.  Hillary Clinton shares her birthdate with both Pat Sajak and Jaclyn Smith.  Funnymen Danny DeVito and Lorne Michaels are joined by Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver.

Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter, who played Alex P. Keaton’s parents on Family Ties, were born on the same day.  Carol Channing and Norman Mailer.  Michael Caine and Quincy Jones.  Doris Day and Marlon Brando.  Francis Ford Coppola and David Frost.  David Letterman and Tom Clancy.  Van Morrison and Itzhak Perlman.  Julie Christie and Pete Rose.  Herb Alpert and Richard Chamberlain.  Jeff Daniels and Margaux Hemingway.  Eva Longoria and Will.i.am.  Merle Haggard and Billy Dee Williams.  Andre Agassi and Uma Thurman.  Alvin Ailey and Robert Duvall.  Don Everly and Garrett Morris.  Rip Torn and Mamie Van Doren.

More pairs that don’t quite compute—Roger Ebert and Paul McCartney, Charles Kuralt and Roger Maris, Vanessa Redgrave and Boris Spassky, John Denver and Ben Kingsley, Harry Caray and Ralph Ellison, Barbara Feldon and Andrew Young, Pearl Bailey and Sam Walton, Sugar Ray Leonard and Bob Saget, Marv Albert and Chick Corea, Chet Atkins and Audie Murphy, Jamie Farr and Jean Marsh, Freddie Mercury and Loudon Wainwright III.

There are others, but I actually want to get back to the original angle about impressive and important shared birthdates.  I think you’ll agree that none of these come anywhere close to the Darwin-Lincoln pair we’re honoring today.  The only other shared birthdate I came across that’s even remotely in the same sort of ballpark occurred on May 6, 1856.  That’s the day on which Sigmund Freud and Robert E. Peary were born.

Sunday, February 01, 2009

Turning a cold shoulder

Oh, how I wish I could.

Unfortunately, my injured shoulder is neither cold nor turnable for much of a distance.  It’s settled down quite a bit, no longer producing sharp pain from the merest of touches or jarrings.  And there’s definitely more range of motion in some directions than there was earlier.  However, my shoulder remains extremely weak.  Between the pain and simple lack of strength, I still can’t raise even the weight of the arm itself very far at all.

An interesting sidelight is the progression of the blood drainage from the injury.  Bruising, that is.  Anyone who’s had a black eye knows the myriad colors of that subcutaneous hematoma as it resolves itself.  Well, I have a good bit of such multi-hued blood slowly draining its way down my left arm.  It’s pretty well outlined the biceps and moved down along the ulnar side of the elbow.  Purple, dark red, brown, some green, and even yellow in some parts.  Quite lovely in a macabre sort of way.

I had the first of who-knows-how-many weekly physical therapy sessions on Thursday.  There are four more scheduled, at which point I’ll be reevaluated for progress.  We’ll work first on range of motion, then move on to strengthening.  My principal exercises involve using something that I can grab with both hands, and then use the good arm to help the bad one move into positions that it can’t get to by itself.  At the PT office, I used a metal cane as the grab bar.  At home, though, I broke out my souvenir Louisville Slugger to be used as the crutch for my left arm.  That’s a souvenir mini Louisville Slugger; it’s 18 inches long.

Many usual activities remain difficult, if not impossible.  In the latter category are the likes of flossing and (my primary PT therapy goal) tying back my hair in a ponytail.  How long will it take before I’m able to raise my left arm up behind my head to hold the hair as I place an elastic band with my right hand?  Who the hell knows?

Meanwhile, I can drive, though not comfortably.  Riding in the passenger seat to a Super Bowl party with my brother-in-law, I had to ask his assistance to buckle my seatbelt.  I can use a computer with fair comfort, as the keyboarding position is a mostly painfree one.  I can carry, say, a clipboard or perhaps a soda can.  But I’m also subject to unexpected sharp twinges (or worse) when any unexpected moves occur.  That might mean a slight bobble, or an uneven floor surface, or just about anything.  I’m extra careful to move slowly and steadily, but can’t avoid everything.

Each day I’m better, I think.  But it’ll be a long haul.

Sigh…