Month: July 2018

Post-surgery Recovery Exercise

I recoiled at the doctor’s post-surgery prescription: no strenuous activity for a couple of weeks.

Just how was I, with the hard-charging brain of a competitive athlete, supposed to follow that? But I knew I had to in order to give myself—and my gums and mouth—the best chance at healing. (You wouldn’t think that area of your body would care too much about how fast your blood was flowing, but it does.)

And I was concerned about how all of this down time would affect our training to walk a pilgrimage at the end of this year. At my age the exponential exercise curve takes a pretty steep, speedy drop after even one or two days without exercise.

So I did a lot of lying around and sleeping the first couple of days, which wasn’t too difficult because of the pain meds I was on. They make you sleepy, and that’s a good thing for healing. And I meandered out to the couch once-in-a-while to watch television (my beloved had himself set up at a standing work table in the living room to work with one eye and watch the World Cup Soccer games with the other. (He a former All-American level player.)

I colored in my coloring book and read a lot. The coloring was so relaxing and appealing to my artsy side that I colored for hours. I read several books—paperback, hardcover, Kindle books and magazines. (I whittled down my magazine pile significantly!) For the most part, exercise meant padding from my bedroom to the living room, kitchen and family room. I wasn’t to bend over or exert myself. (It was pretty nice not having to clean the house or do the dishes for a couple of weeks!)

Then I ventured outside to sit in the sun one morning. (You don’t want to be sitting in the June sun in Tucson past 9:00 or 10:00 AM.) The sun warming up my bones as I rocked back and forth in my patio rocking chair felt glorious. I knew it would help the healing.

When I felt a little stronger and was done with my heavy pain meds (three to four days post-surgery), I padded down the driveway (we have a longish driveway) to the mailbox and back. Then I started joining my husband for a stroll—a very slow stroll because our geriatric black lab requires S-L-O-W)—down to the cul de sac corner and back home. Since there’s a hill on the way back, I needed to pay attention to how much my heart rate elevated. I creeped up the short hill.

Then the cul de sac progressed to down to the corner, and then up another hill and around a different cul de sac with my bundle-of-energy Shetland sheepdog. She didn’t like my S-L-O-W pace, but she tolerated me. I think she knew I was sick because she’d been banished from our bedroom and from napping on our bed with me. I just couldn’t take a chance of her pouncing on my chest and plastering her signature kisses on my face. The sad look in her eyes at the banishment was hard to take.

I added a dip in the pool after my short, s-l-o-w walks and then progressed to doing light “running” and sliding (like side skipping) in the pool, being careful not to raise my heart rate too much.

But, sure enough, as soon as I started feeling a lot better and more energetic, I ramped it all up too much, crashed the day after. (I don’t always take my own advice.) I rested the next day and then struggled back. Then the day I got my stitches removed, I was so happy with the good news the doctor gave me, that I went to the gym and worked out for a couple of hours. That included about 3 miles on the treadmill and some light machine weights. Then I tooled around town to do some errands. I wasn’t in a rush, but it was a hot day, and I was out and about for almost seven hours.

 

And guess what happened? Yup. Crashed again.

 

So I’m easing back into it once more. Everyday has become a “wait and see how I feel and what I can do” kind of day. My husband and I are walking what’s known as The Loop here in Tucson, a beautiful pathway along a seasonal river. We walk just part of it and have increased our round-trip mileage to 5.2 miles. We even tested our new Gore-Tex rain jackets in the monsoon rain.

But I’m not back to doing that kind of mileage everyday, which I need to be doing to train properly for our pilgrimage. And 5.2 miles is far below what we’ll have to walk on a daily basis when we get there, even though we’re planning to take once-a-week Sabbath days.

I can’t worry about that, though. God knows where I need to be, and He’ll direct me. (I just need to pay attention.) And if we have to cut down on our daily mileage while on pilgrimage, then that’s what we need to do. And be joyful in the cutting back! There will be something to learn in long days and short.

Until then, I need to continue to pace myself, and pay attention to how I’m feeling from one day to next. Then decide if I can push myself a little more one day, or lighten the load.

For now I need to continually remind myself that I’m still in recovery, and plan accordingly.

The bonus is that in the process, I’m also learning much about pacing life so I can enjoy it more.

I think that’s a pretty good tradeoff!

 

 Question: How have you had to change your exercise program due to surgery or injury? And how did it go for you?

 

NEXT WEEK: The most important part of anyone’s walking training—your feet!

 

Until then,

pay attention to your pace!

Blessings,

 Andrea

May you prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers (3 John 2).

Post-Surgery Recovery Meditation—Part 1

I’m so glad the doctor wanted me to have light anesthesia for the three-hour surgery. I don’t think I could have knowingly reclined in the chair that long, with him cutting and scraping tissue from the roof of my mouth, using it to make new gum tissue in front of my four bottom teeth. Every once-in-a-while he’d talk to me, and I’d respond. And every once-in-a-while the pain and pressure were severe enough to make me shift around and moan a little. But he said I was a model patient and everything went perfectly. Thank you, Lord!

 

Post-surgery prescription—

Recovery usually comes with a winding path, and this recovery was no different.

I knew I was going to have lay low—very low—during recovery. I wasn’t allowed to do any strenuous exercise or activity (I finally found out that their definition for “strenuous” was doing anything that raised my blood pressure. (!) I couldn’t bend over—too much pressure on the surgical site and blood flow into the area. I wasn’t to brush my teeth (ach!), or eat hot foods, or chew on anything hard. Since I don’t do well with aspirin or ibuprofen, he sent me home with several packets of the narcotic Vicodin and a prescription for more. I also got a handful of ibuprofen packets, just in case, but I decided to stick to my liquid child ibuprofen, in small amounts.

 

Dealing with physical post-op pain—

Even though I don’t like taking pain meds, I did take them. People who take their pain meds to stay on top of the pain, rather than waiting for it to ramp up and get out of control, recover better. And I wanted to recover. And sleep enhances healing. And pain meds encourage sleep.

So I tried to follow his instructions to the letter and then some. I alternated acetaminophen and ibuprofen to manage the pain. I used the little ice gel pack (I got my ice!), ten minutes on and ten off, unless I was sleeping, which ended up happening a lot. I stuck to cold liquid foods the first day. (Cold beef broth is surprisingly tasty when it’s one of only several foods you can take in.) Then came the cold cottage cheese, buckets of cold mac and cheese. Then a little goat yogurt. Even though I was allowed to “chew” on soft foods, I didn’t the first week. When I finally did get around to chewing on really soft chicken and quinoa, it was a catastrophe. So away went the chicken and quinoa.

 

Dealing with the day-to-day recovery—

And so it went. I wasn’t allowed to pull my lip down to inspect his handiwork, but I had to gently swab diluted hydrogen peroxide on the area twice a day, and I could feel the patchwork quilt he’d sewed into the roof of my mouth. Everything I did revolved around what I needed to do to heal. And, for the most part, that ended up being my meditation.

It made all of the difference in the world having a caretaker to rely on. My precious husband stayed home to work and to see to my needs the first week. “Don’t worry about doing anything. You just had major surgery. You need to focus on recovering,” he kept saying. And that made all of the difference in the world too. Knowing I didn’t have to worry about meeting any deadlines, returning any emails, or making sure things got done. (I did text a lot, which was nice since I couldn’t chat on the phone.)

 

The positive emotional, physical and spiritual effects—

And after the first week of pain and the pallid skin color that comes with illness, I noticed something. The healthy color started returning to my face. I actually looked healthier than I have in some time. The worry lines started softening along with some of my “older looking” features. My eyes looked brighter, happier, even though I didn’t wear a smear of makeup for three weeks.

While lying in bed one day, I realized how happy I was to be able to focus on one thing, and feel stress-free while doing it. I realized how miserable and worn down physically, emotionally and spiritually I can become on just a day-to-day basis, with an over-scheduled and over-committed life. I realized just how much life, and the way we choose to live it, can drain you of energy, happiness and joy.

 

Recovery comparisons—

All of this made me think of a friend who battled breast cancer some years ago, a young mom of four.

Her husband—a worship leader—had gotten a job at another church, and we didn’t see much of one another, although I knew she was battling cancer. When my husband and I were out to dinner one night, we ran into her. She was going through chemo, had lost her beautiful mane of dark brown silky hair and was wearing a dark brown wig cut into a cute bob.

But her face looked strained and her body exhausted. Way beyond the look of suffering a cancer patient normally shows when undergoing chemo. When I learned she was still working at the bookstore during her treatments, I asked why. Her shoulders slumped, and her eyes looked sad when she responded. “I have to. To keep my medical insurance.”

I felt horrible for her. My friend couldn’t lean into her treatment or cancer recovery, meditate on it, and focus on victory because she had to work. She had to drag herself out of bed everyday to put in her hours just so she could keep getting the treatment she needed. Not only did she have the stress of severe sickness weighing on her heart and chewing away at her body, she had the emotional and physical stress of maintaining a daily work grind.

My friend finished her treatment, had breast reconstruction and seemed to be doing well. Until the cancer returned, and she passed away. She worked through all of it, and I often wonder: How would she have done if she’d been able to focus completely on her health and recovery? If other burdens had not weighed down her heart, soul and body.

I’ve had other friends who’ve battled cancer in much the same way. Although they didn’t have to work, they lived as though they did. Determined to make sure life went on as usual during an unusual time, they pushed and exercised, and tried to muscle through the treatment. And none of the people I’m talking about survived. They may have seemed to be doing okay, but then the cancer returned or metastasized beyond treatment. The one friend told me she returned to cycling training as quickly as she could in order to get the chemo out of her body.

Now I haven’t done any research on it, but I’m wondering if that kind of approach typically leads to that kind of ending. I know it’s important to do things you love and maintain social contact, and family connection during a time of illness, I wonder if, in our haste to pursue normal or not let anything change our course, we don’t deliberately lean into and meditate on healing as much as we should. Nobody likes pain or problems, and we tend to fight and run from them with all of our being. But maybe leaning into them, meditating on them, and embracing them is the best prescription.

There really is a lot to be learned in the course of an illness and recovery. Maybe wrapping our arms wide around it and working to extract everything we can from the event is the best thing we can do to enhance healing.

 

To consider—

What are you going through right now that you’d be better off leaning into?

 

NEXT WEEK I’ll talk about several things I learned and took action to correct—to enhance my physical, emotional and spiritual health now, and in the future!

If you join me this Wednesday for Workout Wednesdays, I’ll give you a brief overview of what went right and what went wrong in the exercise department during my initial recovery.

 

Until then,

Don’t miss a single meditation opportunity in your life!

Blessings,

 Andrea

May you prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers (3 John 2).