Tag: moving

Heavy lifting and hernias

heavy-lifting-hernias
Bob avoids heavy lifting by hiding out in the garage

On Monday afternoon, two wiry young men backed a furniture van into our driveway and began unloading our goods and chattels. My nephew’s wise words rang in my ears – “Hopefully the movers are doing all the heavy lifting, Uncle – LOL.”

One of these blokes was wearing a knee brace. I made a mental note to ask him about it, as furniture removalists are prone to injury, hernias in particular.It turned out he had injured his knee playing soccer with his kids (sound familiar?) As you may have read (see link at the end) I had serious knee injuries in the late 1960s, so now go to some trouble to avoid doing anything which might inflame either of my knees.

Apart from our furniture, we had approximately 110 packing boxes of various sizes and weights. I did not lift any of these boxes, which came off the truck on a trolley and down a ramp four or five at a time.

Those two lads deserve a medal. Their day started early, loading the truck from a storage unit in our former town. Then they drove four hours via back roads (the Cunningham Highway was closed). It was also very hot and humid but they persevered with the work until finished. We directed traffic – put this here, take that there, but mainly instructed them to stack boxes in the garage.

As a bonus, these lads put our two beds together, having no clue as to how much domestic angst was avoided in the process. (They seemed surprised, but pleased that we presented them with a slab of beer. They promised not to drink it on the way home.)

Once they left, it became apparent how difficult it would be for two people over 70 to stick to a self-imposed ban on lifting anything heavier than 20kg.

When I had an inguinal hernia repaired in 2004, the surgeon at Nambour Hospital assured me it was so common he had done 600 repairs that year alone.

As I recall, he said the injury was most common in furniture removalists and farmers (and sedentary office workers). An inguinal hernia occurs when part of the lower intestine protrudes though the inguinal canal. The injury commonly occurs through straining (e.g. improper lifting, constipation or persistent coughing). Wind instrument players (trumpet, saxophone) are also prone to inguinal hernias.

Check out Weird Al’s disco tribute to hernias.

In my case, the hernia dated from when I bought an old ex-government desk (a heavy one with a metal frame).

“Bend your knees and don’t strain,” I instructed my son, “or you’ll give yourself a hernia.” At the first ‘one, two, go’ I felt something pop in my groin area. Next day I had a noticeable lump. Our family GP at the time took hold of the lump and told me to cough – twice.

“Yep, it’s a hernia. You’ll need to get it repaired eventually.”

He did not put any time frame on this, other than to add that if I had excruciating pain, get to hospital ASAP because sometimes hernias become strangulated.

So in May 2005 I took two weeks’ sick leave to recover from the operation. On returning to work, I found that sitting down for eight hours was very uncomfortable. I bought one of those doughnut cushions commonly found in nursing homes.

Last year, Australian surgeons repaired 100,000 hernias and many more went undetected or ignored. The lifetime risk for males is about 1 in 5 (1-50 for females). In 90% of cases, surgeons use a fine nylon mesh patch to reinforce the muscle wall of the lower abdomen, as it greatly reduces the risk of recurrence.

Updating my 14 year old story, I discovered a new medical term – ‘mesh migration’. This is when (in 5% of cases), the mesh insert moves to another part of the lower abdomen. While relatively rare, the problem does exist and can occur years after the operation. Most of the literature is contained in medical journals, but I did find one or two in blogs generated my personal injury lawyers.

Occasional groin twinges and aching knees aside, at 71 I am still relatively fit and agile. The test, as Billy Connolly once quipped, is how long it takes you to get out of a bean bag.

When moving boxes to the relevant room, we employed a much-used luggage trolley – a big one with rubber wheels. When something felt like a two person lift, I would summon She Who Had a Laminectomy Years Ago and we carefully manoeuvred the object onto said trolley.

There are good reasons to avoid heavy lifting or poorly executed lifting.

In 2013, musculoskeletal injuries comprise 90% of claims made to Worksafe Australia (our workers’ compensation organisation).

As Axis Rehab notes, lower back injuries make up the large majority of work-related injuries. They can range from less serious muscle strains, or joint sprains, to more serious injuries (disc prolapses).

“These injuries can occur from a traumatic event, but can just as often result from something as innocuous as rotating to reach for something, bending to tie a shoe lace, or picking up something unexpectedly heavy or awkward.” (So, Bob, forget about carrying me over the threshold-Ed.)

Most injuries involve large and complex joints – shoulders, hips, knees, ankles and wrists. The modern answer to chronic knee and hip paint is to replace the joint with an artificial one. If you live long enough, you may need a second one! A large study by The Lancet, which used thousands of cases in Australia, concluded that the average life span of a hip or knee replacement is 15 years.

An article in New Daily stated that hip and knee procedures are the most common type of joint replacement surgeries in Australia. More than 850,000 hip and knee replacements have been recorded in the past 20 years,

The Australian Orthopaedic Association’s National Joint Replacement Registry last year reported 63,577 knee procedures and 47,621 hip procedures,

The anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury is the one all professional sports people fear more than most and not just because of the intense pain. It can take six to nine months to recover full mobility after an ACL reconstruction, as the graft needs time to heal. Australia now leads the world in the number of ACL joint reconstructions.

A Medical Journal of Australia study of ACL injuries found that the incidence is rapidly increasing among young people. During the study period, (2000-2015) 197,557 primary ACL reconstructions were performed. The annual incidence increased by 43 during the study period and by 74% among those under 25 years of age. Direct hospital costs of ACL reconstruction surgery were estimated to be $142 million.

The big question is whether a young person who has had an ACL reconstruction (or two) will need a knee replacement in the future. The cost disparities are obvious. In 2013, some 400,000 inpatient primary hip and knee procedures cost Medicare more than $7 billion for hospitalisations alone. Medicare spent an average of $16,500 to $33,000 per patient for the surgery, hospitalisation, and recovery from hip and knee replacements.

Apart from being costly to the nation (and private health funds), knee replacements are quite radical operations. I know a few people for whom they did not go smoothly. Given my chequered history of knee surgery, I have decided that unless I am literally unable to walk, I will take my old knees to the grave. You read it here first.

https://bobwords.com.au/septuagenarian-motorbike-dreams/

Thanks to those who have joined the annual subscriber drive to keep FOMM on the road. If it slipped your memory, here is the link.

https://bobwords.com.au/friday-on-my-mind-subscriber-drive-2019/

Insomnia and the four poster bed

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Image: Elizabethan ornate oak four poster bed. Wikipedia, Public Domain

It may come as no surprise, given our circumstances, to read that I/we have suffered bouts of insomnia these past few weeks. Selling up and moving from our home of the past 17 years was one major stressor that contributed to fitful sleep. Then there is the (ongoing) uncertainty about where we will end up living, which in our case requires two people to agree on the location, condition, ambience and price of another home. Thirty-seven house inspections later, we are just about there.

But as you would all know (Australian home owners move on average every seven years), the transitional period is quite stressful. We have moved our luggage from one place to another four times since vacating the premises on September 11. Naturally enough, you leave things behind. For example, I’m supposed to wear black leather shoes for our choir performances this weekend. So far, all I have found is a dowdy pair of brown loafers and a pair of old man slippers (the kind with a flap held in place by Velcro). She Who Had No Clue Where My Black Shoes Were said, “Why don’t you go to the Plaza tomorrow and buy a new pair?” Now there’s a thought.

These past few weeks we have been ‘couch surfing’, courtesy of benevolent friends and relatives, who in truth provide much more than a couch (and a spot for the dog). Still, strange beds, different locations and fluctuating bed times clash with the heightened stress of the displaced person. Not to mention this weird spring weather where you kick the doona off at 11pm and wake up cold at 4am.

For years I thought it was normal to wake at 2.10am with no expectation of falling asleep again. If I did, it was inconveniently about 35 minutes before the alarm told me it was time for work. This was not always the pattern. Sometimes, I could not get to sleep at all, other times I’d fall asleep the minute my head hit the pillow then wake again in 20 to 30 minutes, hyper-vigilant and twitching.

Over the years I discovered there are many different forms of insomnia and the ones outlined above are only some of them.

Medical research agrees that the first line of treatment for insomnia should be behavioural modification. Eat your evening meal at a sensible hour, don’t read, log on to the Internet or watch TV two hours before going to bed. Don’t drink tea or coffee after 2pm. Go to bed at the same time every night, roll on to your side and switch out the light.

The second line of treatment is medication, usually of the type prescribed for anxiety or depression. An article in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine informs us that 40% of adults with insomnia have a co-existing psychiatric disorder.

“Among these psychiatric disorders, depression is the most common, and insomnia is a diagnostic symptom for depressive and anxiety disorders,” writes Dr Thomas Roth, PhD.

As Dr Roth’s paper asserts, 30% of the general population suffer from chronic insomnia; women and older adults are most at risk. Primary sleep disorders including restless legs syndrome, snoring and sleep apnoea can also lead to insomnia.

The artistic side of the brain quite likes insomnia. Some of my best work, and maybe some of yours, has been created in the wee small hours.

But when you have to front up for work and use your brain and make decisions all day, three or four hours sleep just doesn’t cut it. The phrase ‘burning the candle at both ends’ comes to mind. It means excessive work with no time for rest.

The phrase comes from a time when candles were expensive and burning them at both ends implied a wasteful way to achieve an obsession. As the American poet, Edna St Vincent Millay wrote: “My candle burns at both ends. It will not last the night, but ah, my foes, and oh, my friends, it gives a lovely light.”

In the 1990s, when I was working long hours by day and staying up late writing songs, I sometimes had a dozen candles burning at once.  On Saturdays I would take my son to New Farm Park and later to my favourite writers’ retreat, a coffee shop in a massive old woolstore at Teneriffe, an inner Brisbane riverside suburb. The Australian Estate Woolstore had been converted to a furniture warehouse with three huge floors full of classy furniture. It was fun to roam around and check out the stock, bounce on a few beds, try a leather recliner or two and vow that one day, we’d own one of those. Son was 9 or 10 and happy to go off and explore while I’d sit in the coffee shop overlooking the river, blowing froth off my cappuccino and trying to capture the images of the day in a battered old journal.

One time son came back to tell me I had to check out this huge bed.

“It’s got a roof and curtains, Dad.”

The four-poster bed was a beauty for sure, and it had a price tag to match.

“We’d never get it through the front door,” I lied. “Besides, Mum and I are quite happy with the bed we have.”

He went back to building a fort with a pile of sofa cushions while I went back to my journal and jotted down the first lines of a new song “I went down to the wool store, to buy myself a bed; it might help with my insomnia, it was something that I read”.

The Australian Estates Woolstore was later converted to apartments, swept up in the gentrification process that changed Teneriffe from an age-worn industrial suburb to a residential precinct favoured by young urban professionals.

There are lots of coffee shops now in Teneriffe, but none had that sleepy tranquillity, imbued with the ambience of the wool store’s expansive wooden floors and big casement windows that let in the natural light.

Now known as Saratoga Apartments, the Australian Estates Woolstore in Macquarie Street was built in 1926.

Not that Teneriffe’s apartment dwellers would want to be reminded, but I recall the spectacular McTaggart’s Woolstore fire in January 1990. The fire in Skyring Street took hold quickly as the brick and timber building, its floors soaked with lanolin from years of storing bales of wool, exploded. The building was completely destroyed within an hour and the rubble was still smoking next day. That fire took old timers back to 1984 when the Dalgety’s Woolstore at Teneriffe met a similar fate. Those with an interest might like to track down a video called Back to the Brass Helmet which details many of the huge fires the Queensland Fire Service have been called upon to extinguish.

That’s the interesting thing about history – those who like to write down what happened, when, how and where, leave fascinating trails for those of us who care to follow. I went on to finish the song, prosaically called Four Poster Bed. It’s a tongue-in-cheek story about a fellow who spirits a girl away from another chap in a bed shop. It’s fictional, but I like to think it has somehow preserved the edgy, consumerist mood of the early 1990s.

If you had credit, and a degree of lust, you could buy anything.

Last week: Elanora Park is managed by Brisbane City Council, not Redland City Council