• I can start physical therapy. I’ll be contacting them tomorrow (barring expected mini-snowpocalypse) to learn what’s involved.
• I’m ready to start weaning myself from the boot, and putting weight on my left leg more consistently. I began that process before I left Dr. White’s office, by adjusting the angle of my boot from -22° to 0° so I can more easily stand–my toes don’t need to be pointed down any more. No more need to wear the boot at night, either.
• When I swim, I can kick and use a belt to do water jogging.
• I got the OK to drive, but it won’t work until the boot is gone–both our cars are stick-shift, and I can’t press the clutch hard enough yet. (I tried tonight. Couldn’t start either one with my left foot.)

As you might imagine, this is all fantastic news to me. I’m eager to get started with PT and closer to leaving my crutches behind. But slow and careful is still the MO. For example, next time I swim, after warmup, I’ll try easy kicking every other lap. I’m going to double-wrap my repaired leg for bed. And I’m not planning to walk in X weeks; I’ll let my physical therapist help me develop a schedule for that–if that’s even possible. I thought about trying some crutch-assisted walking tonight, but chickened out. No matter. All in good time.

For the record, it’s been 87 days since this all started.

This is gonna take a while…

And though it sure doesn’t look like winter outside, I also ordered up a set of the ice grips which go with the Tornado tips. Again, well designed; they slip over the tips, then are easily pulled down into place when needed.

Anybody who is gonna be on crutches longer than a week should check out what Fetterman has to offer–much better than standard issue!

76 runs, 316 mi
68 bikes, 705 mi
21 swims, 18.6 mi

Total 165 workouts, 1,040 miles. That’s 66 fewer workouts and 685 miles less than last year–closer to my 2008 numbers.

Two goals for this year:

1. Rehab my Achilles. My next appointment with Dr. White is January 11, and we’ll find out what our next steps are. Right now, I’m working on flexibility, carefully stretching my repaired tendon, as well as my foot, ankle, and toes, and keeping up massage to avoid a repeat of last week’s cramp.
2. Build my upper body and core strength. With pushups and swimming, I’m already working on that, and it’s easy to see the difference in my arms, back, shoulders, and chest. That’s part of a larger goal, necessary for rehab, of better strength and flexibility overall.

My only major setback came early Sunday morning 12/18. About three am I woke to a full-on cramp in my calf. Agony. Obviously, I couldn’t straighten my leg to release the cramp. I tried massage, and that helped, but it still hurt like hell. The pain was so bad I was shaking. I was too wobbly to use my crutches, so I crawled to the bathroom for some hydrocodone and a hot washcloth. I went back to bed, stretched my calf as much as possible, and decided I’d call 911 if things didn’t get better in ten minutes. I guess I passed out. Next thing I knew my alarm was going off reminding me to submit final grades. (More on that later.) I was still in pain but it was tolerable as long as I wasn’t standing. Upright, even with my leg bent at the knee, the pain was intense. I was worried something bad had happened. Another pop? No, no, no, I hoped not.

So I stayed in bed and tried to keep calm. I called my doctor the minute his office opened. The receptionist put me on hold immediately and got Stephanie, his nurse, who ran through a bunch of questions and assured me it didn’t sound serious: Dr. White was in surgery but would get back to me soon. About noon, his nurse called and said White thought I was just having a spasm because of muscle atrophy. She called in a prescription for Valium (“We aren’t going to fool around with Flexeril,” Stephanie joked) and Jason Covert kindly delivered it to me. Immediate help. The next morning, I saw Dr. White and I was relieved to learn everything was okay. In fact, he suggested I could be more aggressive about stretching than I had been. He got down on the floor with me and showed me some ways to work my achilles safely.

The next few days, the pain wasn’t as bad, but I still had a tough time. I fell a lot. I was no help around the house. But I kept up the hot baths and massages, and figured out how to wrap a heat pad around my leg for nighttime. Things slowly got better.

Friday 12/23, Erin took the girls to the Y to swim with Amelia while Madelyn had a lesson. I eagerly joined them. I had to crawl from the locker room to the pool, but I didn’t care. And it took a while for me to feel confident about moving around without my leg unprotected. Thankfully, the pool was nearly empty. I chose a lane close to the lifeguard (just in case). Joan, Madelyn’s teacher, suggested using a buoyancy belt in addition to a pull buoy. I swam two or three laps at an easy pace and stopped to check my leg and make sure things were okay. In the next lane, Erin and Amelia were smiling at me and saying “Go, Daddy, Go.” I was smiling and weeping too. How good it felt to exercise. How much I had missed it.

I swam about 45 minutes Friday, Saturday, and today, and I hope to do the same every day for the foreseeable future. My parents are here now for Christmas, which is helping with the logistics. After nine-plus weeks with no cardio, I’m sore in a few places. I’ll take it.

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Like my cast, the boot positions my foot in plantar flexion, pointing my toes downward to keep my Achilles from healing too long. It’s a lot heavier than my cast. But who cares; I can take it off! As I write this, I have my foot up and the boot off and next to my chair. Tuesday night, I rubbed down my leg and foot with lotion, massaged it top to bottom, and moved things around to see the range of motion I had to work with (answer: not much). Wednesday morning, I took a shower without my leg hanging out the side of the tub (for the first time since October 15), scrubbing off much of the old skin and again testing my range of motion. This morning, after pushups, I did the same thing. I’m still showering in a lawn chair, but that’s no big deal. Better than trying to balance or taking a bath.

White asked me to wear the boot at night and during the day when I move around campus. Makes sense. But when in bed or at my desk, I can loosen the boot and change the position of my foot. I’m not bound to one position as I was with the cast. Between that and the glorious washing, I’m a lot more comfortable, and I’m sleeping better. After a day and half in and out of the boot, my foot already looks a lot less funky. The gap between my toes is gone and my foot looks much more evenly proportioned. My ankle is starting to return to normal–I can see my ankle bone now on my instep, not only on the outside of my foot. (Again, if you are not squeamish about scars, scroll down.) Though my color looks good, I still have some numbness and tingling in my toes and the ball of my foot. If I’m still feeling that after a few days, I’ll head back to White to see if there’s anything we need to do.

No rehab yet–I have to get my range of motion back first. Not to mention my confidence: right now, frankly, I’m quite reluctant to do anything with this foot when it’s out of the boot. This Saturday, I’m hoping to swim, as long as I can work out the logistics of getting in and out of the pool. Crutches and wet floors don’t mix, as I’ve found out the hard way a few too many times this past seven weeks.

So, things are looking up, physically and mentally. I was pretty down the week before Thanksgiving break, and Thanksgiving week too. The past two weeks have gone a lot better. I thank everyone who called, wrote, or otherwise helped me out. Especially Erin. She’s been great. But you knew that already.

So, after six plus years and 3,085 links, to Diigo, I go. It’s sad to see something once so promising fall to bloat and bad design.

Not surprisingly, the seminar was demanding intellectually: after a few days, some of us took to referring to it as “research boot camp.” That’s what it was. We first met the night of July 31, and finished our work August 12–just about two weeks. We had one day off: the middle Sunday. Every few days, new visiting scholars joined us to speak to their expertise: Charles Bazerman gave an overview to situating research in the larger field, and Cheryl Geisler offered a two-day workshop in coding data and discourse analysis. Dartmouth professors John Pfister gave a crash course in statistics, and Jonathan Chipman in visualizing data. John Brereton offered excellent advice about grants. Chris Anson and Les Perelman spoke to assessment and situating research in larger institutional frameworks. The last two scholars to join us, Neal Lerner and Chris Haas, spoke to research design and ethical research. We concluded with two days of presentations in which participants summarized our research design and described what we learned during the seminar, with Haas and Lerner offering commentary. Throughout, all of the visiting scholars were available for office hours and individual consultation–for me, some of the most valuable time I spent at Dartmouth.

The seminar felt like a week, or maybe two weeks, of graduate school every day. Seminar organizer Christiane Donahue planned the calendar very well, keeping us busy but providing time for individual work. Some days, especially early on, consisted of eight hours of intensive seminars. Some were divided between morning seminars followed by individual work, consultations, and group work. None of the activities suffered for want of attendance and participation. Even optional night and weekend classes were very well attended. All of the participants lived in Fahey Hall, a dormitory on campus; classes were held in a common space on the ground floor of the building. It wasn’t hard to find attendees hanging out and working in the common space on the first floor, and it was downright easy to seek help with seminar work: for example, after Geisler concluded her lectures on Friday, I suggested all interested attend a “coding party” on Sunday afternoon. About eight people showed up and worked for two hours, coding each others’ data and reviewing segmenting and coding schemes as well. This good-natured work ethic stuck for the entire seminar. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all work and no play: I definitely enjoyed local beer culture with Scott Whiddon, Molly Oberlin, Justin Lewis, Tara Lockhart, and other attendees. We got to hear Charles Bazerman sing opera during a much-needed first Wednesday social. But it was great to collaborate with a group of people serious about learning and getting things done.

Much of what I learned during the seminar was focused specifically on the transfer research Neil and I are doing. As always, I took notes carefully–55,000 words in seminars, group work, and on my own. I’ve shared my wordcloud. I boiled those notes downs to eight pages of takeaways after the seminar, but can focus on three things here:

First, our research design was too complex. Neil and I wanted to use multiple methods of data collection in order to achieve the complexity we believe is necessary for understanding our research questions about writing in the major–learning about the activity systems in which our participants work. But planning for multiple kinds of data collection is cumbersome. Better to achieve complexity by focusing on case studies driven by interviews–and learning to become a very good interviewer. Here are the changes I proposed in my presentation:

Secondly, I failed to separate assessment and research. Part of the reason for the over-complex research design Neil and I imagined arose from prioritizing institution-focused goals (including all of WIU’s diverse constituencies–transfer students, first-generation college students, etc.) over research goals (gathering a manageable amount of relevant data). Ironically, over-prioritizing WIU needs could mean not meeting them as the study collapsed under its own weight.

Third, I left the seminar with a list of methodological questions to approach as I continue to learn the art and craft of empirical research:

1. What principles can guide our comparisons of information from different sources?
2. How can we measure the quality of our interviews—given the difficulty of research into transfer?
3. How can we be genuinely beneficent to our participants, on the short and long term?
4. What mechanisms can help us apply lessons learned from this study to future work?
5. What support structures and resources will help us move the project forward?

All of the seminar leaders were very helpful, but I want to mention two in particular. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any academic work as hard as Christiane Donahue did for the entire the two-week seminar. It seemed like she was up before everyone every day. Before all else, she created a fantastic intellectual experience for us, providing quite a bit of it personally by speaking to transfer, research design, and other specialities while offering us individual help. In addition, she arranged trips to the local grocery, helped us get access to scholarly resources on campus, and woke up in the middle of the night to help seminar attendees who’d locked themselves out of their rooms. With Kathy Herrington, I was very glad to sneak around Hanover a bit and put together a basket for Tiane which recognized how helpful she was for all seminar attendees. Secondly, Chris Haas: her talk on research ethics came at the end of the seminar when many of us were borderline exhausted. But it was invigorating, and thought provoking too. I went straight from her first talk to a chair and wrote Neil immediately to say, “Hey, we’ve got to think about this.” The two three page handouts she provided were very dense, giving me two or three specific things to think about. After I returned to Macomb, I wrote Haas with some follow-up questions, and she traded email with me, providing some very helpful suggestions and things to read–and strong encouragement as well. Much appreciated.

Quite a nice exclamation point to my year of retooling. A wise choice for all of the audiences I noted above: people like me looking for a mid-career change, early career scholars with projects develop, or graduate students looking to establish a firm grounding in research methods. I’m looking forward to following this year’s Dartmouth Seminar, and getting together with my cohort at CCCC in St Louis.