Homegrown

Friday was my first tissue expander fill at the plastic surgeon's office. Remember how I wondered how he would know where to inject the saline? It was the weirdest thing!!!

He pulled out this contraption about the size of a film canister. It was plastic and tube-like with a magnet in the center. He placed it on my skin toward the top of the expander, and it moved toward the direction of the port! It was pretty cool-looking. I remember when he showed us the tissue expander, it had a circle at the top of it with a gel-like plastic piece covering a metal disc. That metal disc is what the magnet was targeting.

He marked an "X" over each port with a black Sharpie. He cleaned the area with iodine and the nurse brought out a bag of saline, a syringe, and a needle all attached together. He poked the needle through my skin and through the port. He wasn't sure if I would feel it (I did!). It stung a little. But when he broke through the port, that kind of hurt a bit. Think of someone popping through a thick membrane under your skin. Ouch! They wanted me to tell them when I felt pressure, which is a signal for them to stop. This resulted in having 50 cc's injected on my right side, and 35 cc's on the left side. It's okay for them to be a little out of balance at this stage (he inflated them differently during surgery, too). After that, I got two little band-aids to cover the needle site and that was it.

I felt a little bit of pressure and tightness immediately. Over the next couple of days, there was some muscle pain in my chest and in my back. I think the back muscles feel tension because my shoulders sometimes roll forward or up unnaturally. Already, though, I feel mostly like I did on Thursday. That is, I kind of felt worse on Friday and Saturday, but it's feeling better now. It felt a little bit like a "setback", but I know that expanding the tissue will eventually be a step forward.

It's amazing what we women do to look beuatiful ;-)

Today Rusty and I did something we haven't done in a LONG TIME. Don't be gross. We brewed beer! Remember my post a week or so ago about how Rusty harvested our hops? Well, I was really itching to do something that felt "normal" and we wanted to start using those hops as soon as possible, so we made a yummy IPA with LOTS of homegrown hops. It's been so long, we almost forgot how to do it. Rusty took some pictures. He thinks if you put in enough pictures you barely have to write anything.

Here's a picture of me grinding the grain. This is the first time we've been able to use this grinder that we bought many months ago:

And here's the beer!


It should be ready to drink in about 4 weeks. Two weeks in the fermenter, 2 weeks in the bottle. If I know us, we'll try it at 3 weeks, but it probably won't be carbonated enough. That's never stopped us from trying, though.

So, it clearly won't be ready to be my first beer in three weeks. WHICH IS IN 2 DAYS! Oh, I can't wait.