March 28, 2018

Bits of This and That

Last week, we stayed home, ate healthy home-cooked meals in, worked, and just sort of had an uneventful life.  (So uneventful that I have no photos to post.)

I'm doing strength, stabilization, and PT exercises and my shoulder seems to be holding up okay.  There are some new clicks and its obviously more loose, but it's not an emergency.  I can do pushups and dips and have full range of motion with very little pain.  I eased back in to running and got in 12 miles for the week.  I'm comfortable that I can build back up to my previous mileage without too much trouble.

I looked at a local highly regarded sports medicine orthopedic surgical practice to find someone who specializes in dislocated shoulders and was shocked to recognize the name of my original surgeon from 20 years ago.

I had assumed he must have retired by now because I remember him being firmly in middle age.  Turns out, 20 years ago, I thought someone in their mid 30s was older than they were.  20 years later, the surgeon is only in his mid fifties and still practicing.

Unfortunately, their clinic doesn't accept my current insurance.  But, as the intake nurse made clear, I'm nowhere near as bad as I could be.  She asked how often I was dislocating my shoulder, was it *every* *day*?  YIKES. [Clarifying comment -- Eegads, no.  Just the one time this year.]  So, I'm still in pretty decent shape as these things go.

The current plan is to strengthen the arm back up, keep running, aim to get back into yoga and reach back out when I get an opportunity to change insurance.  If I have to use a different surgeon, I will.  But, ideally (fingers crossed and a quick prayer) nothing will force me to have surgery in the short term and the original artist will get another crack at his work.

Other than that, I finally deactivated my Facebook account.  I downloaded all my data and confirmed that my browser isolation policy had kept me fairly clean on the unintended data collection side, but when I reviewed everything they had (52.7 MB, small by FB standards, but still a ton of data), I had a very strong sense that there is absolutely no reason a third party should have that much detailed data about my life. 

A while back I'd considered terminating, but after evaluating it, I'd been staying on for 2 running groups, a tortoise club, and a book club, but with my shoulder issue turning me purely into an easy flat surface runner for the forseeable future, I figured the running groups were less likely to be useful, I confirmed with my book club that they'd keep me in the loop via email, and I decided I could just use YouTube for my tortoise fix.

My original thought was that I'd give it a month of deactivation and assuming nothing serious on the regrets side came up I'd formally delete my account.  But, after a few days, I feel such a sense of relief.  When I'd done the inventory of my own personal cost/benefit of using Facebook, I hadn't realized that it also made me feel an odd sense of obligation -- now that I'm free, I'm realizing that I felt like I *had* to look at and process a bunch of posts whenever I logged on.  Subconsciously, I'm sure this is part of why I'd slowly been decreasing my FB logins over the last year or so (and I was never a super-frequent poster).   I'm not sure where that feeling came from or what it was all about, but not having it feels great.

4 comments:

Cathryn said...

I wish I was closer so I could ask you all this in person.

First of all, hugs about your shoulder...I'm glad you're not in too bad shape. Disclocating every day???? Ugh....

Ref FB...
- Do you not think that it's a case of shutting the door when the horse has bolted? I've also been considering shutting down my FB page but wonder if it will be much safer to be there now that there's been this outrage?
- Because you've downloaded all the data, do they not have it any more? Have you actually taken the data from them?
- Will you continue to use IG? I believe FB own IG and I'm curious if that app is as dastardly as FB.

Jen said...

Dang, I didn’t realize you were dislocating your shoulder every day. Geez. You are way more hardcore than I will ever be.

I can’t bring myself to quit FB. I have followed your advice to use separate browsers. And I’ve deleted Messenger from my phone - but haven’t been able to delete the FB app itself, mostly because I do need to reference things sometimes, like event info.

Biting Tongue said...

@Jen & @Cathryn: I am *NOT* dislocating my shoulder every day. It hadn't occurred to me that this was a condition that was common. I've done it 4 times in 20 years, 3 times post surgery. When the intake nurse asked the question, I realized I'm not that bad off at all, since I assume she asked because this is a common problem for their shoulder dislocation patients (but not me, so I can try to relax a little and take care of it a little later).

Re: @Cathryn's questions:

1. I do expect it will likely get safer in the future as a result of a) the outrage; and b) the trends in privacy (such as GDPR) that will force them to be safer. I don't however, think it's a good trade off for me, even if it's 20% safer.

2. No. I got a copy of my data, but they still have a very broad license to use it and don't have to delete it unless I'm in a jurisdiction with a "right to forget" like Spain or California for minors.

3. Yes. For now, I will continue to use IG. FB does own IG, but it's been operated as a separate entity since the acquisition in 2012, and they have indicated on several occasions that that they understand that IG is the future of the company so they've been more careful with it than they have with FB, which, if you read between the lines, it appears that they view as their legacy platform.

Cathryn said...

Thanks for the thoughts BT xx