Immediately after surgery I spent about half to two thirds of the day in a Percocet-induced haze.  The sleep that came was not restive and my days settled into six hour cycles of four hours knocked out, about an hour of just being slightly dazed and then an hour in pain waiting to take my next bout of pain killers.  By now, that cycle had turned into two hours of being somewhat loopy, two hours of being useful but not being about to completely think straight, and two hours of dull ache.  During most of the day I still didn’t have the mental acuity to study so I passed the days with other things.  Today that thing was trying to learn how to do Tuvan throat singing.  I found some instructional videos on Youtube and over the course of five hours taught myself the basics of overtone singing.  

The muscles used in this style of singing seem to be used for almost nothing else and after my first few rounds of singing I found the muscles of my face starting to fail me.  At the end of five hours, everything between my nose and neck hurt like hell and I realized spending four hours a day practicing would result either in an inability to swallow or a tongue that’d be able to crack walnuts. I felt like hell but was another day closer to recovery.