Early present

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Leah will get an early present this year. She’s going to have surgery on the Monday before Christmas.

She has been having leg pain for several months because of pressure on a nerve in her spine, and she is experiencing some weakness in her leg. She has fallen a few times lately, once in the shower and once in the garage. She has avoided serious injury only through luck. It has reached the point that surgery of some sort is necessary.

The surgeon gave her two choices, fusion of the L4 and L5 vertebrae, or a laminectomy, in which the doctor removes some of the tissue that is pressing on the nerve. As usual, the choice was not clear. The laminectomy would almost certainly eliminate the problem, but it’s possible that the vertebrae might have too much motion as a result, and a fusion would have to be performed anyway. Fusion seemed a surer bet, but fusing vertebrae results in reduced motion, which often leads to back problems in other locations.

The laminectomy is a less complicated surgery that requires less time to recover — weeks instead of months. We asked the doctor the probability of needing fusion after a laminectomy. He said maybe 10 to 15 percent. Then we asked which he would do if he were in Leah’s shoes. He said a laminectomy. So that’s what Leah is going to get.

The surgery will be first thing Monday morning. And I mean first thing. We have to be at the hospital at 5:30 that morning. That’s bad enough, but Leah is supposed to drink a special carbohydrate supplement two hours before she arrives, plus take a shower with an antibiotic soap. And it takes about a half an hour to get to the hospital from our house. So we’ll be up shortly after we go to bed.

Leah is not looking forward to the surgery. She’s worried about a lot of things, some of which are even possible. Her father had surgery at about 81, and suffered permanent cognitive decline as a result of anesthesia (Post Operative Cognitive Dysfunction. Here’s the wikipedia article; if you search for POCD you will find lots of other articles, some pretty scary. See in particular the first sentence of the abstract at that link.). He also had back surgery many years ago, and that surgery left him with a weak leg.

And then there’s the fact that when we asked the doctor which surgery he would do, he said he would really not like to have any surgery. But, as I said, there really is no choice at this point.

More Zoe vocalizations

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I have posted before about how vocal our dog Zoe is. I have a couple more examples.

She has different vocalizations for different situations. There is the impatient whine when I’m preparing her dinner. There is the sort of growling she makes, sometimes for unknown reasons, and sometimes because she has to go out to relieve herself. And then there are the simple barks.

She barks a lot. Sometimes it’s because she sees something that wasn’t there before, or maybe a cat that she has seen many times before, and sometimes just for the sake of barking, to announce her presence to the world.

She is certainly the most vocal dog I have ever had, and maybe the most vocal dog I have ever met.

More clouds

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A weak cold front came through this area early Thanksgiving morning. There was some rain, and then some clearing, perfect conditions for fog to form. And it did.

We could see nothing of town. I imagine the people down there couldn’t see much either.

Clouds and leaves

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A cold front moved through Wednesday afternoon, bringing clouds and rain. After the front, there was some clearing, just enough for the sun to illuminate the clouds to the east, over town.

The more I look at this shot, the more I like it. I took it with the panorama mode on my iPhone. I keep being impressed with what nice shots it can make.

I walked the dogs before noon, while it was cloudy but not raining. We are past the fall peak for the leaves, but some maples still held onto some color.

I hope everyone has a good Thanksgiving.

Pink clouds

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A cold front moved through Sunday. Before it passed, it brought some high clouds. I noticed them as I was driving home from running an errand. Most were cirrus uncinus, or mare’s tail clouds. Later, near sunset, when I took the dogs out, they were tinted pink by the setting sun. They looked like a painter had dabbed pale pink in the sky, and then whipped the brush up and away. I immediately dragged the dogs back inside to get my phone. By the time I got back outside, just a matter of seconds, the clouds had changed. They were still nice, though.

If you look carefully there is a hint of a bright spot and a little color in one of the clouds. It’s in the left third of the picture, about two thirds of the way from the top. Here’s a closer look.

I’m not quite sure what caused this effect. It was too far from the sun to be a parhelion, or sun dog, but it was about at the same elevation as the sun, which was out of sight behind the mountain. The cloud seems to be too far from the sun to be iridescent clouds, and the colors don’t like quite right to me. I thought it might be part of a parhelic arc, which circles the horizon at the same elevation as parhelia, but those are generally white, without color. If it were part of a parhelic arc, you might have expected to see other parts of it in the clouds, since some seem to be at the right elevation. But maybe not. I’m not aware of any other arc or halo that would appear where it did, so, in the absence of better information, I’ll just assume it’s part of a parhelic arc.