That the occupational therapist/ergonomic advisor I met with today was appalled by how I've been treated by doctors when bringing up mobility aids shows how the more knowledgeable one is about mobility aids the less likely they are to dismiss people who could actually benefit from them. Who knew

Hot take... Fallout New Vegas isnt the masterpiece of gaming people say it is. A lot of the things I've seen people say are its greatest assets are actually hindering it in other areas.

Rant below cut

Having three visible places of interest at all times is well and good but in between those places are a lot of empty, boring space and enemies designed to punish you for going off the path. Sure, damage curves are great in games, but I'm so god damn tired of walking on this road, chasing after a target that will move just enough that it's never in reach until it's finally like a ten minute jaunt from the starting area. But if you try to take short cuts even just to cut corners on the road you get owned by mobs made to keep you on the path. Or set pieces designed to physically funnel you through a specific area. That's railroady as hell.

Speaking of which, karma systems suck if you dont make being evil fun. I have only ever seen good karma systems in Fable, because being evil is turned into this hilariousy visual thing and it neber directly punishes you for choosing the evil paths, instead making a lot of things easier in some ways. In New Vegas (and Fallout 3 if I remember) what is the point of putting stat points into any thief abilities if you get a big frowny face every time you succesfully steal from a locked container? And Karma isnt even directly explained in any way that doesnt just feel like an ominous "The game will remember that" at least in 3 it was made clear really early on that certain people wanted nothing to do with you based on how good or evil you were.

And as far as unclear instruction goes Caravan isnt explained well at all. The dude you enter the game with gives you some but you have to exit dialogue and read the instruction, re enter and accept, hoping you remember the rules that arent even that clear to begin with. I didnt even realize I had to manually select the vertical position of my card or that I could play on opponents until my third online how-to guide and now I still just use the bug in the programming that apparently was supposed to prevent you from cycling through your cards on the first hand to pretty much cheat a win every time because it tool so long to figure it out I dont want to deal with actually playing legit.

I've seen people say it has a lot of morally grey choices but so far I'm not seeing any. A lot of the more ambiguous choices seem to be something you wouldnt find out until the game is over, like which sheriff you choose but you're provided next to no information to make even a slightly informed opinion. The rest seem to be more "Do bad thing for caps? Or good thing and get shot a bunch of times?"

Even the factions feel very eh. It isnt morally ambiguous, it's that every choice is a bad choice. War never changes... and neither does the Brotherhood of Steel. The NCR is well intentioned but also absolutely useless. They dont even care in Primm whether you do their job or not and just sit uselessly providing nothing but an obstacle to walk around to get into the town. Then in Nipton only one NCR person cares about the distant smoke but claims they're so underfunded and undermanned she cant check it out... but me, a courier with a nearly broken shotgun and nearly broken leather armor can easily just walk in and gun down the four legion dudes and still nobody really gives a shit besides my faction standing... and who knows how the Legion figured out I killed their dudes in a literal ghost town where the only survivor is a dude who they disfigured and cant walk outside to see who is shooting who. Speaking of which, I felt more compelled to help raiders in Fallout 3 at times than I did the Legion or the Powder Gangers. The first thing you ever see of the Legion is the aftermath of them torturing and murdering an entire town. "B-but the town was full of criminals and morally bad people!" Says the game as if that matters when I'm staring at a pile of burnt bodies and guys bleeding out that the only way to help is to waste weapon condition to kill them. The Powder Gangers could have provided a decent argument against the beliefs and authority of the NCR... if your first meeting wasnt them threatening the small town that helped you or if they didnt lob dynamite at you on sight.

Everyone is terrible is a running theme in Fallout games and New Vegas doesnt offer anything new there. Two bad choices just makes me want to not make a choice, which is probably why so many people laud the Independent ending, cause at least the bad choices are yours.

Like, New Vegas isnt horrible, but it isnt the best game ever or even the best fallout ever. If anything it is equally as bad and good as other Fallouts. And for as bad as 76 can be, at least it isnt boring as hell to look at. Skyrim may have been Bethesda showing off their world design, but I've restarted Skyrim like 50 times, I'm not sure I want to slog through the starting areas of New Vegas more than twice. I have stared at the road texture so much.

Also I wish I had a carry weight cheat just so I could finally get stuff back to a work bench to repair my stuff. Tired of constantly being encumbered in a game that makes scrap actually important.

i also realized i never actually talked about her surgery, so if youre like me and enjoy medical stuff then here we go! injury/surgery in question is a super digital flexor tendon (SDFT) displacement ftr.

the first day i brought stellina in for surgery (which ended up being rescheduled due to emergency stuff) the surgeon actually could not get her tendon to luxate (pop in/out of place), so she said that it might be a very minor case where surgery wouldnt be needed and we could just do splinting. but then they did an ultrasound to check and that showed that her tendon was in fact completely out of place, it was riding along the edge of the groove it normally sits in. it just wasnt luxating because it was stuck there somehow. so it was stable... but stable in the wrong position. so surgery it was.

the first thing the dr said to me after the surgery was “hey, your dog is fine but also really weird” to which i was like “yes i agree but please elaborate.” she explained that when they opened her up they could see her tendon was out of place, but the reason it was stable was because it had already formed a bunch of scar tissue around it that was now rooting it down in the wrong spot. for the timeline of when she injured it and how recently they could still move it, that is apparently REALLY fast formation of scar tissue. so they cut that out and put it back in place. the dr also confirmed that her heel bone was malformed, in that the groove the tendon normally sits in was very shallow. this is a defect found almost exclusively in collies and shelties. so the dr manually deepened the groove back to a normal shape, and then used sutured through the bone in addition to soft tissue to keep it fixed in place. so that heel is locked down like fort knox now.

does the other heel also have that same deformity? most likely. unfortunately you cant tell without physically opening up her leg, so there’s not a way to test for it. the deformity is assumed to be hereditary, most likely a simple recessive, but there’s no way to test for it. i discussed with her breeder and they hadnt had any other dogs with this type of injury (or at least none that had been reported back to them) so i think stellina is just unlucky. 

the good news is that the left heel should now be stabilized and i at least know what to look for in the future if she ever injures the right one. as far as tendon injuries go, this one is uncommon but an “easy” fix - bc the tendon itself is not actually damaged, only the soft tissue that holds it in place, it heals relatively fast with no real lasting effects. the dr was saying how she has only seen 5 or 6 of these total in her career as a surgeon, and then ironically another dog with the same injury came in the same day as stellina lol. 

anyway ive learned a lot about dog heels and i’m fairly surprised that this never came up in my pre-puppy research considering how apparently it’s a fairly unique thing that collies and shelties are both prone to. i’m also REALLY glad i was so obsessive about diagnosing it, bc when she first injured herself she got like 80% better after a few weeks but was still not quite perfect. and i HOUNDED the doctors at work even though they kept saying to just give it more time bc i was just obsessed with why isnt this getting better why is this almost good but not all the way why why why. and that eventually led to them diagnosing it with “yes this is a real problem that needs correction.” bc if i had stayed complacent she could easily have gone her whole life with a tendon fixed in the wrong position, and just have been a dog that has a bad leg and limps after exercise. but she’s fixed now and i’m happy (and also going to be even more paranoid the next time some injury happens lol).