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I’m going to do a Seventh post-op tomorrow just to make it a whole week series of posts on my inguinal hernia operation. However, I don’t have anything much to report as there is almost a zero pain level on my Probaway Pain Scale. When reading, or on the computer, I don’t feel any pain even when I put my attention on the surgery site. If I push about a pound of pressure on the site with my fingertip I can get about a PAINS~2, which can be easily felt but easily ignored. Debbie and I take a couple of walks every day and even though there is still lots of tricky ice on the ground and we occasionally must walk carefully, most of the time it is now dry surface walking. I am very careful walking because slipping and falling on the ice might rip open the surgery. We both wear Yaktrax, a spiral spring device that slips over standard shoes or boots. It works really well on most icy surfaces.

Today one of our neighbors was clearing snow off his roof with a new style of roof rake, called Avalanche. It works much better than a standard pull style roof rake which I have been using for pulling snow off my roof all winter.

I made a big mistake about three weeks ago when I put some New-Skin liquid bandage on two tiny cuts on my fingertips. Each was less than a ¼ inch long and shallow, but they were deep enough to bleed. With little scrapes like these cuts I usually put some New-Skin on them and forget about it, and the problem is gone forever. This time was a little different and it made a big difference. Because of the shape of the cut, they spread open slightly, very slightly, and when I put the liquid bandage on the cuts it flowed down into the cut. They were so shallow I didn’t think about it, but a week later, and now three weeks later, they still haven’t fully healed. What happened was that, because the opposing sides of the cuts were not in contact with each other, the healing had to take place deeper in the skin. That left a V-shaped slot in both fingers that is only now fully functional without any pain, but there is an unnecessary hard bit of skin on either side of each of these cuts. When I get this type of cut again I will pull the skin together with adhesive tape so the opposing sides are touching. In that held-together condition, those kinds of cuts would heal in a couple of days.

The subtitle of this Probaway blog is – Life Hacks ~ Many helpful hints on living your life more successfully. This post was in that tradition.