The toes report

Met with the orthopedic specialist on Friday. Surgery in the next month or two as soon as it can be scheduled. Basically, the muscle tone and uncontrolled muscle spasms in my feet have caused my big toes to be just shy of dislocated. I have really strong muscles! And as I’ve mentioned before, it’s as if all of my muscles have their own individual brains, none of which listen to the brain in my head.

I’m going to have surgery on both of my big toes as the doctor thought it was just a matter of time until my right toe gets as bad as my left. I’ll be in the hospital for a night or two after the surgery. The whole thing involves cutting tendons to my big toes, shaving off some bone on the knuckle parts of my toes, pins for 6-8 weeks. And then I’ll have another quick sedated surgery to remove the pins.

What else to say? It’s going to probably be a long, painful couple of months. Hopefully, it’ll be less painful once I get through it all.

Which brings me to…

Auto-captions

I’ve discovered over the past several years that my auditory neuropathy (AN) and hearing loss makes it difficult to follow conversations. CART (real-time) captions and closed-captioning helps me better understand what’s being said. For every day conversations or doctor visits, that’s not really an option.

My mom’s coworker let her know about Google Live Transcribe app for Android and we’ve been trying that out for everyday conversations. We also used it at my visit to the orthopedic specialist on Friday. It is amazing.

What do I like about it?

• The text size can be enlarged so I can see it. I have visual tracking issues so larger text helps me read more easily.
• The auto-captioning with Live Transcribe is pretty accurate. My mom reads along and points out when something is inaccurate. Like when the doctor said 6 to 8 weeks but Live Transcribe wrote out 66 instead. 66 weeks of pins in my toes is very different than 6 to 8 weeks.
• Being able to read what was being said helped me fill in the gaps for when the discussion was sounding like a statick-y radio, which is what happens often with my AN.

Which brings me to…

My Book

Editing is long, hard work!