Another Hobby Blog

Monday, November 27, 2006

Knee Update: I Get To SWIM Again!! :)

...which is what I was doing just before it started snowing. I was swimming (really Swimming! frog-kick, front-crawl, swimming!) for the first time since my surgery, and I would have stayed in the pool longer had another gym member not drawn my attention to the white-stuff sticking (Sticking??!) to the roads.

so I'm in a much better mood today, having finally had the chance to exercize (and enjoy it!) for an hour.

which means it's time to capitalize on the decent mood and tell you something that happened recently before something else goes wrong and my mood tanks. (apparently my husband's car stuck in the snow is only enough to dampen my mood, not dispell it completely.)

Check-up appointment with my surgeon was last Tuesday (just before Thanksgiving, which might explain the delay before I got to go swimming), and he's pleased with the progress. He shook my knee, pulled it, pushed it... decided it was still attatched. :) He's happy with my range of motion, and says I get to go Swimming again! yay!! finally some exercize (real exercize!!!) that I can *enjoy*!! (not this lifting weights junk that I've been stuck with for the past several months! .. it has it's place as a fill-in activity, but it is *not* my idea of daily exercize! ew!) .. so I spent an hour and a half in the pool doing laps. :) and would have easily spent another half hour had it not been for the snow/hail/ice/rain/sleet stuff.



He loved his socks! :) Loved them, I say!! nearly in tears with joy, if you can imagine! I even got a *hug*!! wow. a hug from my surgeon. How amazingly cool is that??!

He says they're his first pair of hand-knit socks ever and they're already his favorite, even though he hadn't tried them on and so can't really know whether they fit right! .. he said he was going skiing over the weekend and would bring them with! :) Yay!!

So I guess, since my surgeon had to do a patch-and-repair on my knee, it's only fitting that he should get a one-of-a-kind pair of hand-knit socks that endured several patch-and-repair jobs before they even got off the needles!

Let's just say that I was up, knitting, the night before my appointment, until 5:00AM getting these things done. Worth every bit of it.

This is what they looked like just a short week prior:



The astute among you will already have noticed that the heels changed color somewhere along the way.

Yes, I realized with horror that I was *not* (despite careful weighing of the ball of yarn and the sock throughout the progress to be sure I'd have sufficient for the second sock) going to make it all the way to the toe of the second sock, and in fact there was some doubt the yarn I had would actually turn the heel on the second sock. I'd searched all my LYSs in the hopes of finding the yarn to match with no luck, and when we travelled to Tucson for a couple of days to visit with Keith's father, I checked the LYSs there--also no luck. But somewhere along the way I found a yarn that co-ordinated pretty well (if only I'd planned it that way from the beginning! would have saved me some knitting and ripping and re-knitting!)

So with one sock completed, and the second sock knit to the start of the heel, and with one scant week before my next appointment, I realized what I'd have to do...

I didn't really have the time to rip the completed sock back all the way past the heel and re-knit it all, but I needed the yarn that made up the heel and the toe so that I could complete the arch of the second sock!



So I put in a lifeline around the heel, and took it right out!



I picked up the stitches and re-knit the heel in the contrast yarn. There were some anomalies. The untrained eye probably will not notice. The trained eye would notice and forgive.



At Midnight, the evening before my appointment, I thought I had a pair of socks. :) One last try-on on my own feet to be sure (as sure as one can be when the size of one's foot is 4 sizes plus a gender different than the target!)... and was astounded to find out that one sock was approximately 12 rows shorter than the other in the foot length! Yipes!! how did that happen?? .. apparently in the gusset formation of the second sock. .. but again, I was short on time to actually rip back!

So two more lifelines and take the toe right off:



add in the missing 12 rows, and kitchener stitch it back together. :)



It's even hard to tell there was a repair made from looking at the finished socks!
I love kitchener stitch!

1 Comments:

  • At Mon Nov 27, 11:44:00 PM PST, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    What a great patch job. I'm especially touched by how appreciative your surgeon was when you gave him the socks. It was very brave of you to knit for him. I'm always concerned that I'll get a less-than-appreciative reaction after having that happen to me in the past. Your experience gives me hope. Happy swimming!

     

Post a Comment

<< Home