Things Get Converted - My Arm, and my future painting plans

So, a quick update to explain why my painting has been getting slower lately, why it's going to be really slow for the next few weeks, and why it should pick up again soon.

I celebrated my final day of being 32 by having a surgeon perform what I am assured was a simple conversion on my arm. This meant that I started my 33rd year by pressing a morphine button, and ended the day with this photo.

Fire and blood. Welcome to Westeros Medical. 

For the last ten years or so, I have had an osteochondroma on my arm. I won't go into gory details here, but essentially it was a bone spur on my left arm just beneath the shoulder. When it was first found it wasn't visible, but about seven years ago it started to be visible through a shirt sleeve unless I had my arm twisted around, and for the last few years it was visible to a point that wasn't able to be hidden. 

One of the annoying things for the last few years has been that it's something stuck beneath the muscle. I haven't been able to sleep on my left side without waking up with a dead arm for a long time. It's also meant, as the arm that I've usually got raised to hold a mini when painting, at the wrong time of the day, or when I'm tired, or if I've tapped my arm at some point, or even just twisted it at the wrong angle, painting has been pretty tiring. 


This is a futuristic bandage, as shown by the hexes...

So at the moment, I am officially 'recovering' from shoulder surgery, which means a few weeks off work (And the weekly rotating roster I hate so much) while parts of my arm heal up. Admittedly, it is not as bad as I was initially planning on it being. The first few days it was uncomfortable, but there was medication to deal with that. The past few days my arm has been out of the sling more and more, and I'm getting more movement back as well as the physio stretches getting easier. 

It has meant that the last few days have meant I've been finding lots of interesting things my arm can't do at the moment. My upper arm can move a reasonable amount, all things considered, but it has very little strength, and at certain angles just fails to be lifted. So getting a drinking glass form the top shelf is fun, as I have the strength to lift the glass and move it, but the height of the shelf means I have to get on my toes to get the right angle to get it down. Patting a cat is entertaining at some angles.

I've also discovered that either anaesthetic in my system, or being worn down from moving my arm around, or a combination of these two has meant that some days I will randomly fall asleep. So the Friday after the surgery a quick nap turned to sleeping for 3.5 hours, and earlier today after reading a book for a few hours, I was tired enough to be out for close to 6 hours. 

But apart from that, I can actually move my arm to a position to paint (I suspect) with little trouble. So the plan for today was to paint (Until I fell asleep), but I'll try that tomorrow. It also means that my next few blog posts will be me catching up on photo editing, then probably some army level painting, and hopefully in the near future, I'll get back to painting display and better models. 

Hopefully I'll be back to painting better stuff. 

Expect more updates soon :)

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