(no subject)
So it's been six months (give or take a couple days) since my surgery. Before I had it, I expected that I'd be 100% back to normal by now, and I'd probably be going to the gym and losing weight and feeling pretty good.
The reality is a bit different. I feel probably about 90% now. I have some energy. I have no real pain unless I sneeze or cough. I have reasonable mobility in my body. On the other hand, I still get short of breath. I still hurt when I sneeze or cough. I can feel my chest sort of roaming around sometimes. When I tilt my head back my incision is super tight (and when I get up in the morning I sometimes stay hunched over a bit because to straighten feels really uncomfortable).
Little things cause setbacks. Like when I got a cold at the end of December, I felt almost as bad as I did around week three because of all the coughing. I felt so much pain in my side that I went to urgent care last week and had them do chest x-rays to see if I'd cracked a rib (I didn't! Yay!).
I'm also not totally back to full capacity at work. It's a good thing my boss believes in me. I have been running at about 70% productivity since maybe late November? And before that I wasn't more than 50%. So I'm improving, but not all the way there yet.
But damn. Six months is a long time to be recovering. I can't imagine what it must feel like to not recover. To be sick all the time, every day. That spoons concept, where you only have so many spoons in a day and sometimes you just run out when you're disabled? I get that totally now. And I've now had a bunch of days where I ran out of spoons. I couldn't be more grateful that I am slowly getting another spoon here and there, every few weeks.
The last two weeks I've been trying to force myself to get to bed earlier. I might be one of those beta sleepers (as one of my friends called it), but I have the ability to fall asleep pretty quickly, so at least if I force myself I can get maybe 6.5-7 hours per night. And I'm drinking a lot of water, taking all my pills (including some supplements: potassium, D3, biotin, zinc, and a multi—thinking I might add in a B of some kind), and trying to eat better at least during the day. I still am snacking at night, so maybe I can cut that out. And on weekends I tend to only eat two larger meals, which isn't very good. I guess I am at 70% effort in taking care of myself. Maybe next week I can get it to 80%.
Anyway, closing in on bedtime. Tomorrow I want to get a bunch of things done. Laundry, housecleaning, maybe file taxes, do a little work, pay some bills. What I don't want to do is get distracted and get to 9pm with nothing accomplished. Here's to that.
The reality is a bit different. I feel probably about 90% now. I have some energy. I have no real pain unless I sneeze or cough. I have reasonable mobility in my body. On the other hand, I still get short of breath. I still hurt when I sneeze or cough. I can feel my chest sort of roaming around sometimes. When I tilt my head back my incision is super tight (and when I get up in the morning I sometimes stay hunched over a bit because to straighten feels really uncomfortable).
Little things cause setbacks. Like when I got a cold at the end of December, I felt almost as bad as I did around week three because of all the coughing. I felt so much pain in my side that I went to urgent care last week and had them do chest x-rays to see if I'd cracked a rib (I didn't! Yay!).
I'm also not totally back to full capacity at work. It's a good thing my boss believes in me. I have been running at about 70% productivity since maybe late November? And before that I wasn't more than 50%. So I'm improving, but not all the way there yet.
But damn. Six months is a long time to be recovering. I can't imagine what it must feel like to not recover. To be sick all the time, every day. That spoons concept, where you only have so many spoons in a day and sometimes you just run out when you're disabled? I get that totally now. And I've now had a bunch of days where I ran out of spoons. I couldn't be more grateful that I am slowly getting another spoon here and there, every few weeks.
The last two weeks I've been trying to force myself to get to bed earlier. I might be one of those beta sleepers (as one of my friends called it), but I have the ability to fall asleep pretty quickly, so at least if I force myself I can get maybe 6.5-7 hours per night. And I'm drinking a lot of water, taking all my pills (including some supplements: potassium, D3, biotin, zinc, and a multi—thinking I might add in a B of some kind), and trying to eat better at least during the day. I still am snacking at night, so maybe I can cut that out. And on weekends I tend to only eat two larger meals, which isn't very good. I guess I am at 70% effort in taking care of myself. Maybe next week I can get it to 80%.
Anyway, closing in on bedtime. Tomorrow I want to get a bunch of things done. Laundry, housecleaning, maybe file taxes, do a little work, pay some bills. What I don't want to do is get distracted and get to 9pm with nothing accomplished. Here's to that.