Revelation – Rants and Revelations

5 Years of Pain

So a little under 5 years ago, I was taking a paddle and I had a pain in the area of my left sit bone so bad I had to stop paddling, get out of the boat, do some stretches, and continue on. The previous year had been lockdown and in spite of the fact that I only had one race that year I had been training hard and working on Strava segment CRs and virtual races. But 2021 was going to be my best year ever, and so I started out the year with a bang. Most years I had been lucky to get more than a few 10 mile plus paddles in before the Round the Mountain race, but this year I’d started out with a plan to really ramp up my mileage, and maybe take a shot at the 90 Miler the following year. So there I was, a month to go before the race season started, and I was already doing 25-30 kilometer long paddles. And feeling an annoying nagging pain. I was also doing 3-4 hour long bike rides on days I wasn’t paddling.

The pain kept increasing as the season went on, but rather than cutting back on training, I kept going. I did end up having an amazingly good season, in spite of the fact that towards the end of the season I would need to push my butt out of the seat for a few seconds to get some momentary relief, then continue on. I couldn’t wait for the end of the season, and when it finished I put my boat away and didn’t touch it until much later than I usually start the following year. And when I did, I went for an easy paddle but was in agony after 15 minutes, and spent another 30 minutes getting back to the dock because I had to keep stopping because it hurt too much. Much later in the year I discovered that with a thermarest pad placed exactly right, I could stand slightly longer paddles, but with much reduced stability so I only paddled my more stable boat on the most wave free segment of the canal.

Now the problem with the sit bone area of your body is that there’s a lot going on there. Basically near your sit bone (your Ischial Tuberosity), you’ve got a bunch of muscles anchored there, like your Performis, and your Quadralatis, as well as your Sciatic nerve, your Hamstring tendon, and there’s a Ischial Bursa there as well. So during the last 5 years I’ve had a lot of conflicting diagnoses, a lot of different therapies, and a lot of medical interventions.

As an aside, is there such a thing as being immune to cortisone shots? I’ve had a bunch of them over the years, including in my knee, in my shoulder, in my carpal tunnel, and in the last 5 years, in various nerves and tendons etc. And I’ve never gotten a smidgen of relief from any of them. The closest I’ve gotten is sometimes an hour of relief from the anesthetic they inject before the cortisone.

Anyway, after trying everything from stretching routines to spinal implants, my local pain doctor suggested I need an Ischial Bursectomy. I asked him who could do it, and he cut and pasted a Google search into an email and sent it to me. Basically no local doctor does it. And if you do the search, you find several doctors around the country whose websites say they do it, but when you contact them they say they don’t do it any more. Oh, and maybe a few doctor’s offices who think you’re saying something different – I didn’t catch on until a few of them said “we only do hip operations”. I tried saying it like “iskeal” to see if that helped with the understanding.

Eventually I found one doctor on Park Avenue in New York who, when you call to ask, the front desk says “sure, we do it” and makes an appointment, but when you fly down there at great personal expense, the doctor says that they don’t do it, but have you thought about PRP? To say I was pissed off at his clinic was an understatement. Ok, I had thought about it, but it seems pretty dubious, since all it is is that they take some blood out, centrifuge it down, and inject parts of it back into you. There’s a similar therapy going around but instead of your blood platelets, they inject sugar or something like that. I think the theory behind both of them is to stimulate an immune/inflamation reaction. But I did know that one of the doctors I’d used in Rochester does PRP, so I went back and tried that, and it was ineffectual. (Oh, and not covered by medical insurance.)

Eventually somebody on Reddit’s r/ChronicPain subreddit got in touch with me to say that they’d had an Ischial Bursectomy from a Doctor Harris in Houston and it had done them a world of good. So I got in touch with Doctor Harris’s office and after jumping through a lot of hoops I got an appointment to fly down there so he could examine me. And he agreed to do the procedure! I was so happy! Doctor Harris exudes confidence and healing.

So eight days ago, I went under the knife (or the arthroscope) and got exactly what I’d spent the last couple of years dreaming about. He gave me some photos taken through the arthroscope, showing all these fibers growing out of my bursa and preventing my sciatic nerve and my posterior femoral cutaneous (PFC) nerve from moving the way they’re supposed to be. And after photos showing the bursa gone, the fibers gone, and both nerves free of entanglements. He said that in normal conditions, that bursa is about 1mm thick, but mine was swollen up to about 6mm. He also said that while he was in there, he was moving my leg around and practically had me doing the splits to make sure there was no impingement between the bones in there, which can be a problem. No wonder orthopedic surgeons look so fit, when they have to move my fat ass around like that.

So like I said, it’s been 8 days and of course I’ve got post-op pain. It’s really hard to judge whether the pain I’m feeling right now is the same old pain from the last 5 years, or it’s because somebody inserted a metal object and stared scraping away parts of my body. But considering that a lot of the pain I’m feeling is from different places than the old pain, I’m hopeful. I think the doctor suggested I might not know for sure how much difference it has made until 5 weeks go by, so I’m trying to be patient about this. And mostly succeeding, but not 100%.

Oh one other thing – Doctor Harris suggested I get a DEXA bone density scan because he felt my sit bone was a little soft. How shit would it be after all this to find out that the pain was actually my sit bone collapsing under the pressure of sitting on it 18 hours a day?

So where do we go from here? Well, I promised myself a new camera to celebrate this milestone. The question I’m waiting to find out is do I buy a new drone (the Avata 360 when it comes out) for filming other people’s kayak races, or do I buy an action camera (the Insta360 X5) to mount on my kayak for filming my own.

Obviously I’m hoping for a return to kayaking, but I’m thinking I’m not going to be as fanatic about it – no more 6 days of kayak work outs and a 4 hour bike ride on the off day. I believe that piling on more and more workouts didn’t really improve my speed that much any way. Plus it’d be hard to maintain a consistent workout regime when I’m trying to do more with Vicki. I think the goal now will be to get in such workouts as I can, go to races when I can, but work them in around my life instead of working my life in around the kayaking.

And what if the surgery didn’t fix the problems? Well, then life will be pretty much like it’s been for the last year – RV trips with the “rule of 3”, and videoing some kayak races. It’s not awesome, but it’s good enough to tide me over until I find the next thing to try.

The rule of three is “travel no more than 3 hours a day, get to your destination by 3pm, and spend 3 days at each campground”. We’ve kind of modified it to have a couple of 3 hour days in a row before recovering my pain levels by having a 3 day or more stay at a campground. But we’ve been thinking about longer trips, like across the country, and there’s no way we’d want to do that unless we can manage a few 5+ hour days between the major stops. Doing it 3 hours at a time would take more than a whole summer.

Drone My Roof Part 3

As I wrote about in Drone My Roof and Drone My Roof Part 2, I was getting my roof redone at great expense, and I was determined to get a good time lapse of the whole process. As I said in Part 2, I made a circular waypoint track. At semi-regular intervals I went out and flew it twice. My intention was that for each time I flew, I’d use some non-integer number of circles. I wasn’t sure if I’d use 7/8ths of a circle or 9/8ths of a circle, but I thought it would be more interesting that doing one full circle each time. Which is why I did two circles, and also why I had the circles start at the back of the house instead of the front. (Actually, I forget why I chose starting at the back, but because I was going to do a non-integer number of circles I didn’t think it would matter).

For about a day and a half I didn’t think to put starting and stopping the camera into the waypoint file, so there was a bit of a bobble around the back of the house as the drone decided that it needed to turn 45 degrees and possibly move a bit while moving from the end waypoint to the beginning of the next, even though they had the exact same latitude and longitude. I had to edit those bobbles out, to greater or lesser success each time. The last 3 or 4 missions didn’t have the bobble, which was a great relief.

I sped up each clip by 4x, so that it was obvious it was a time lapse. I also added the start time of each clip as a caption.

The other thing I discovered is that even though the drone is tracking 20-odd GPS satellites at once, there were significant differences between different circles. Usually not much between the two circles in one go, but between one mission and the next, sometimes 5 or more meters difference. Which I find a bit odd, because my first gps, a Garmin GPSMAP 195 which only tracked 12 satellites at once, could quite consistently show you which lane you were in when you used it in the car (in spite of it being an aviation GPS). And my Garmin Forerunner 920XT fitness watch could show which side of the river you were on.

As well as the problem with the circles being offset, the center point also meandered around – I had to save a new one several times. Unfortunately the KMZ file only saves center points that are in-use, so you can’t go back to an old one if you save a new one. It’s confusing, because during the session, you can have multiple center points saved, but after you come back to the waypoint file, all the ones that aren’t actually in use are gone.

I did some messing around in Final Cut Pro trying to get something usable out of this. A while ago I used a weird trick I’d found on Reddit’s r/finalcutpro sub-reddit to center a tracked object on the screen, involving inverting the clip, tracking the object, and then applying that to the non-inverted clip. Unfortunately there wasn’t a trackable object in the middle of the roof, so I was wondering if there was a way I could track the four corners of the house and do some sort of geometric mean on that. r/finalcutpro was not much help with that, but suggested I ask in r/vfx but they used a lot of terminology that I didn’t understand. Something about a gaussian splat or something like that.

So I decided on two things. First is that I’d do a single circle each time, starting from the more logical front of the house. Second is that I’d try to hide how badly the waypoint moved around from time to time by using a transition that had a lot of movement in it.

First attempt at editing

Then as a second attempt, I zoomed in 25 percent, and tried to use the slop to center the images a bit better. I did that by using some guide lines on the screen and setting a keyframe at each cardinal point and moving it as close to centered at each point. But there wasn’t enough leeway in the video – many of the positions I couldn’t get the roof centered without having black bars on the outside.

Second attempt at editing

Not perfect, but I think it’s better than the first attempt.

So lessons learned:

Make the waypoint file go full circle or maybe two circles without stopping, starting at the front of the house.
Make the circle further out or use a wide angle lens so there’s more slop on the edges for cutting in.
I think I’d fly slower and speed it up more – I like the frenetic movements. I know I said in Part 2 that I didn’t like it that way, but I’m having second thoughts.
Be more careful about launching the drone at exactly the same place each time – some of the worst offsets were the times I had to launch at somewhere other than the exact spot on the sidewalk I’d chosen for most of them. In one extreme case I had to take off the screen window and fly it out the door.

Flying from my doorway

Diabolical dream

Had a dream this night (it’s 3am, so I can hardly call it last night). Ok, there were a lot of extraneous parts of it (like Bart Simpson helping defeat the rebels because the rebels accidentally left him behind, and something about drinks machines and group showers) but in part of the evil Empire is having a victory celebration when Darth Vader singles out somebody for being a traitor.

Said traitor then responds that there is a drink bottle in his desk “upstairs” with what will look like ordinary water to any scan known to man. But it will eventually destroy anything it touches but first it will turn that thing into more of itself. It’s currently in the air, in the water supply, and eating its way through his desk. Eventually it will consume the entire planet (or Death Star, not sure which it was). Since there is no way to know if it’s in you or not, everyone here who leaves the planet/Death Star might be bringing destruction to wherever you go. Every one here, including Vader and the admirals, are effectively dead.

It was sort of like grey goo meets a super virus. And I’m kind of astonished my brain thought it up.

Drone My Roof Part 2

So in the last blog post I left off with wanting to do some manual editing of the waypoint file. The first thing I had to do was grab the KMZ file from the controller. The controller is an Android device, and I have two programs that are supposed to allow you to connect to Android devices on your Mac. I’ve had inconsistent results getting these connections to work. One of the programs, OpenMTP, warns you to close the background tasks from Google Drive and Dropbox and Android File Manager before it will be able to connect. And by trying various combinations of doing that, rebooting the computer, rebooting the controller, I was able to connect a few times.

The waypoint file is a KMZ file, which is actually a zip file containing two files, template.kml and waylines.kml. They’re both relatively straight forward XML files. You can figure out most of the syntax just by looking at one of the files you’ve downloaded from the controller. So after I got a connection to my controller, I grabbed one of the KMZ files, extracted the waylines.kml file to copy the first “<Placemark>” to the end of the “<Folder>” and change the “<wpml:index>” tag from 0 to 17. I refreshed the file in the KMZ file and uploaded it to the controller.

This gave me a full circle that returned to the start, which made it much closer to what I wanted. I still get a little bobble when I restart – even though it’s moving from point A to point A, it still has to turn the drone about 45 degrees and then back, for some reason. Also I decided that since I’d decided to change from shooting a hyperlapse to a sped-up video, the drone was moving too slowly. Also it looked like the gimbal angle was down too far, so the roof was not the center of the video. I made the changes to the waylines.kml file to support that – I changed all the “<wpml:waypointSpeed>" from 0.213… to 0.852 (meters/second). and I changed all the “<wpml:waypointPoiPoint>” so the third argument (the height) changed from 3.0 to 5.0 (meters above ground). But then I had a multi-hour long struggle to try to get the damn controller connected to my Mac. Eventually I gave up, and tried my ancient Windows laptop. I don’t know why, but I thought Windows had native support for Android. But before I could even try, I discovered that since the last time I used it, it’s decided that it no longer has any drivers for the WiFi or Ethernet controllers. I presume that’s something to do with the fact that it’s Windows 10, and it’s ineligible for upgrade to Windows 11. Not that I could, without a network connection. So I guess it’s going off to electronic recycling. Pity.

But as I was coming to terms with the fact that the laptop I “borrowed” from a former employer is no longer working, I glimpsed a USB A to USB C port handing off one of the front USB ports on my Linux box. I use the Linux box from the command line all the time, but I figured for this I’d probably need to be in the GUI. So I logged into KDE, and plugged the controller in. And it immediately popped up a Dolphin file manager window showing all the files in the controller. So I was able to do those changes. What a change to find something that’s easier in Linux than on the Mac.

I did a couple of test flights this morning. At first, the one bit of XML I wasn’t sure about, the command for what to do at the end of the waypoint flight, wasn’t set right. Fortunately you can do that easily on the controller. After those first two flights, I wasn’t happy with where the drone was pointing. I decided to edit the POI on the controller, and did two more circles and I think it came out just about perfect. I suppose I could make another edit and duplicate “<Placemark>“s 2-16 at the end so it can do two circles without having to restart, but I’m kind of running out of time. And what I’ve got now is pretty good, especially after I speed it up in Final Cut Pro X.

KC2GLRR Part 2

Wednesday night, some of our fellow Cougites (yes, I’m inventing that word, and no, I will not be taking notes) said that they were going for a hike at 7:30 am. Did you know there was a 7:30 am now? I guess I knew back when I worked, but I’m retired, and mornings are for lazily checking all my socials, doing the Wordle and Connections, and stretching out my hamstrings as well as I can. The four of us might toddle out of bed by 10 am, but only because we all need a pee.

Also, because of my chronic pain and Vicki’s sciatica, not to mention the blisteringly hot weather we had while we were there, we’re really only good for one “thing” a day. Sometimes two. And while we were there, that one thing was variously a hike to Old Man Cave, a trip into Logan to shop at the Kroeger, a hike to Ash Cave, playing corn hole (extremely badly – the spectators made us stop at 11 because otherwise the rest of the brackets wouldn’t get done by dinner). Also, Vicki signed up to provide a bunch of stuff for the pot luck dinners on Friday and Saturday night, so she spent a lot of time cooking.

The cave hikes were amazing. In many ways they reminded me of the Niagara Escarpment, especially the Bruce Peninsula, except the cliffs and undercut caves were on both sides of you. But there were differences too – these cliffs were sandstone rather than dolomite, so they didn’t have rectilinear cracks all through them, and the pattern of water erosion was different. Both “caves” were more big overhangs where the cliffs had been undercut by running water. I found Old Man Cave more interesting because the hike is through a narrower canyon and there were some very interestingly designed bridges over the river in several places. I would have loved to fly my drone though there and video some of that, but the process of getting permission to fly in an Ohio State Park was somewhat complex. Plus I probably would have had to do it at 7:30 am, whenever that is.

As I said, there were a couple of pot luck dinners in the evenings – plenty of food and really good food too. Brian make pork butt that was excellent. One morning there was a pot luck breakfast as well. I forget who was manning the grill (I told you I’m bad with names, didn’t I) but he somehow made world’s thickest pancakes without burning the outside or leaving a gloppy uncooked core.

Friday I flew my drone around to take another video of the campsite while everybody else was lined up for dinner. As I’m writing this it’s still uploading, but when it’s ready, it should be visible at:

After dinner, the evening’s entertainment was often sitting around the campfire and chatting with the other Cougites. Some nights we played a game called Left Right Center, which is completely random and mindless, but also crazily entertaining. A good thing to play when you’re drinking your favorite adult beverages.

One of the suckiest thing about chronic pain is no matter how careful you are to try and sit in a way to minimize the pain, it just sucks the energy out of you all day, so it’s mostly my fault that we didn’t stay well into the night at the campfire like so many other people did. I feel bad about that, because I loved the time we did have together.

Saturday night and Sunday morning, many of the other Cougites were packing up to leave, and by the time we had sorted out ours and the dogs bathroom activities, there was only one other Cougar left. And they left the next day. We stayed until Wednesday – it’s the first time we’ve camped for a week in our trailer, and it’s not the end because on Wednesday we packed up and headed for another campground, Mountain Top Campground in PA. We’re going to be here until next Tuesday, making a 15 day total trip. We’re trying to expand our time horizons for trips because either next year or the year after, we’d like to take a trip out of British Columbia, maybe doing the US route one way and the Canadian route the other.

Because I bet you’re dying to know, we used the pooper scooter 3 days at Top O’ The Caves, doing the grey tank 3 times and the black tank once. I know a lot of people say they don’t use the pooper scooter with the black tank, but I gave it a good and thorough flush-out afterwards, and did the grey tank afterwards, making 3 trips on the same day.

Oh, and returning from one of those trips to the dump station, I got what I assume is the southern equivalent of a bollocking – after I drove back to our site, the two “trainee camp hosts” at the entrance to our loop of the campsite came by in their golf cart, and asked me if I was all right because they saw me driving fast and assumed I was having an emergency. They sounded so geniune. Yeah, ok, I get it. I tried to pay more attention to the 5 mph speed limit after that. It’s a lot easier to do that when you’re going out to the dump station, because the pooper scooter says not to exceed that speed, but coming back empty with the scooter in the bed of your truck when your loop of the campground is almost completely empty, not so much.