Susan Stewart

I’ve been lucky in that most of the time once I stopped walking (or worse still, standing) and rested and stretched, the pain usually went away-I only noticed it when I focused on it. It was lack of function, not being in agony all the time.

Interestingly my right knee now looks just as bad on the scan as the one I had replaced, but all the exercises done for strengthening knees post surgery must have helped as it’s not a problem. My right foot and ankle on the other hand…

I lasted until just before my sixtieth birthday when the joint had become so bent and distorted that I was walking like a penguin and everyone agreed that it needed to be done. It’s six weeks of recovery wishing you had never agreed and then after this wondering why it wasn’t done sooner

For a year or so until I had to go to the UK to deal with my mothers funeral, which involved thousands of steps and on public transport around different parts of London… and that made it clear that walking had to be carefully managed…

My rheumatologist gave me a cortisone injection and that was enough to get me back on my feet off crutches and into the pool. I was already on meloxicam (nsaid) due to the rheumatoid arthritis. So lots of physio and some weight loss and hydrotherapy got me walking again.

I tore a meniscus in my left knee at the age of fifty five and the mri showed the arthritis (the osteo surgeon and the rheumatologist disagreed on whether it was rheumatoid or not). It was too bad to have an arthroscope to fix the meniscus and I was told to wait until I hit sixty if I could.

It depends a lot on where you are. I’m in SA with a non profit health insurance and I waited three weeks after the surgeon decided I couldn’t go any longer and the gap was just for the anaesthetic. In home physio and hire of walker and shower chair etc was all covered. It’s all a lottery.

But given how frequently the ATO keep messing up the tax on his super (this year there have been revisions all the way back to 2018 including one refund that was reversed 24 hours later) I’m not altogether confident of their ability to administer it.

for a professor who got his chair in his early thirties and is now in his mid sixties, it’s notionally just over 2 million (on the defined benefit scheme)

Water based exercise was the best for me- just walking in waist deep water, but I also had some other exercises and I’m a fairly decent swimmer. I really should get back to it, but I had a series of breast cancer ops and got a bit sensitive about wearing bathers.

Both can be true… I managed to go for six years or so exercising on a borked knee-it’s finding the right exercise. My other knee looks worse on a scan than the one I had replaced and it feels fine. Unfortunately they don’t do ankle and foot joint replacements.

Pain management for chronic pain is woefully inadequate everywhere (my Dad was in the UK). The evidence seems to be that opiates and their derivatives work for a while but soon become ineffective if used regularly, except in ridiculously high doses. They can be very good for acute pain.

With physio, hands on stuff never worked terribly well for me-it was getting a set of exercises from one that strengthens the supporting joints and stretches that keeps the stiffness from making everything worse. I only needed a couple of visits to get those worked out

The prescription anti inflammatories work better for me, but I think it depends a lot on how much inflammation you have and how much crunchy bone on bone stuff there is (I have both rheumatoid and osteoarthritis so have both crunchy and inflammatory)

By the end of his life the dosage needed to reduce pain was so high he was basically semi comatose until he ran out of his month’s supply in the first week of the month.

The trouble with codeine for chronic pain is that it doesn’t work at all for some people. Like me. For some people it requires increasingly large doses to get the pain relief and effectively is addictive- although I reckon that in my dad’s case it was addiction to the lack of pain

In the kitchen under the
sink.Just one of the many maintenance jobs that getting someone else to fix seems to be an insurmountable obstacle

I used to be able to do things like regrouting myself but I can’t do ladders anymore and if I sit on the floor to do low level stuff (like change the water filter that is supposed to be changed every year) I can’t necessarily get up.

I’ve been living without lights in the main bedroom for six months as I can no longer get bulbs that fit the existing light fitting. But doing something about it means finding an electrician and worst still, workimg out what I want to do with the lighting. I hate home maintenance.

Religion wasn’t much on the agenda, and we did spend rather a lot of time trolling the religious education teacher, especially in the sixth form (year 12/13) when we still had to do religion and PE despite them not being on the A level syllabus.

If that’s the London production I went to see it as a kid as that year the school choir did a production of it ( the year before we did Joseph and his amazing technicolor dream coat). Going to school in London in the 1970s had its advantages.

If they are adequately resourced and have genuinely extended hours then they are great. But they only had one doctor and one nurse (and no scans or X-rays at the weekend). If I’d come in half an hour later I would have had to go on to the emergency department to get my potential concussion checked

On paper it’s a great idea. My local one was a mixed experience-I got there just after 1pm on a Saturday and had to wait a couple of hours and they were turning away people before I was seen at 3.30 (“Open 8am-8pm however we may stop accepting patients towards closing time due to demand”)

My husband in an apartment in Brisbane reports Fttb is out there

Patchy outages, obviously. I’m on internode in Adelaide (fttp) and it hasn’t dropped out at all

So we’re signed up for AUKUS with a country that openly defies/denies international law.
That could take our defence forces to some even darker places.

But not Australia.

A truly shameful moment.

The Albanese govt is an integrity vacuum.

Australia Institute Live: Francesca Albanese calls refusal to criticise Trump's illegal Gaza plan

6 February 2025:

LNP policy: Frame ethnic cleansing as a peaceful and practical solution.

ALP policy: Don't criticise ethnic cleansing

Enjoy
live.australiainstitute.org.au

So, is literally anyone in the Albanese government going to say anything at all about what’s going on in the US?

Trump has just announced he wants to ethnically cleanse Gaza, Musk has the codes to the US Treasury, they’ve deleted US AID … meanwhile Albo, Marles and Penny are still mumbling ‘AUKUS’

They've given up pretending.
My SMH/The Age cartoon.