Tripod cat #2 and xray results

I quite like looking at pictures of my insides. It's like discovering the unknown. In the past three and a half years I've been xrayed on five occasions, one of which involved being first injected with a dye, and I've had a nuclear scan which was a gamma camera video of radioactive material passing through my kidneys. The nuclear scan was most fascinating. As you leave they give you a little card that instructs you to stay more than six feet away from small children or any pregnant women for 12 hours. By now I should glow in the dark like the gloworms on the West Coast.

My spine looks pretty good. This is a weight off my mind because I was worried about the discs. The lumbar curve is not quite as curvy as it should be and there is some mis-alignment in the pelvis and lower vertebrae but nothing too anxiety causing. In speaking to various experts I've come to the conclusion that the problem stems from an operation I had in May 2003 which goes by the horror movie name of dismembered pyeloplasty. It involved a long incision through my abs on the left side so that my kidney could be refashioned. It had become blocked and, being that I ignored the rather obvious symptoms for a long time, had swollen to about the size of a rugby ball. It nearly filled half my abdomen. How this affected my back is that any large incision like that has a huge effect on the stabilising muscles of the spine, not to mention causing a huge imbalance. Seeing that the trend is for everything in my lower back to shuffle off to the right this is beginning to make sense. So, I need to learn to activate those muscles that have gone into a sulk. I am finding that Pilates relieves the pain significantly, although it bores me to tears. I've also made an appointment to see a man on Monday that uses a machine to measure muscle activation.. I can't be any more specific than that for now, but my chiropractor tells me it's exactly what I need.

And now an update for the cat people. That cat is a wiz on three legs. You should see her go! I think she went through an adjustment period and may have had some 'feline depression' (or so it seemed). I watched her grooming one day and she licked the air where the leg used to be! Then she got a look on her face like 'didn't there used to be....?' but now she has decided that probably there never was a leg there anyway. It seems that she has become more muscular in the front, just as you would expect. She can jump, just not as high, she navigates narrow ledges (it's a bit heartstopping to watch) and, in the last few days she has taken up her babyminding duties again. Cleo has always followed my niece Jasmine around like her little guardian angel and now the angel is back on the job. Isn't that a little bit of a 'warm fuzzy'? It's a bit hard to photograph a black cat with a camera-phone, but here she is. She is still half shaved from the operations - nice 'french poodle' legs!