Lesson Learned

If I've learned one single thing over the past year, it's been to PACE myself. I honestly never realized just how much I needed to slow down in order to breathe better.

In the beginning, that is, before COPD, my normal pace was to walk fast. Anything I did was at a rapid speed, and I took pride in being able to get things done quickly. This was something I did without any conscious thought and there were innumerable times when someone would ask me if I always walked that fast. I'd always reply that I didn't realize that I was.

After COPD, I had the hardest time breathing because my pace hadn't slowed to accommodate the decreased lung function. After several years of stubbornly refusing Pulmonary Rehab, and being miserable with my declining health, I finally surrendured and let go of the denial.

I enrolled in Pulmonary Rehab in my area, and it made a huge difference in the quality of my life. I learned how to breathe out during exertion and breathe in for recovery. I learned breathing techniques and finally learned the importance of pacing myself to make my life easier.

Over the past year, I have been forced to move even slower, now at a snail's pace. The surprising benefit that I found is better breathing. It took broken bones to make me pace even more, and move even more slowly while doing things. I feel pretty comfortable doing the snail's pace, and I don't feel embarrassed as I had previously. I guess there's been that pesky pride thing going on that didn't want anyone to think I was less of a person because I had to go slow. I had to learn the hard way, as most lessons are learned, that pride never helped me breathe better.

I am learning on a daily basis, ways to take care of myself, and make lemonade out of lemons.

~Eileen

Journey to recovery

When I get discouraged, I have to remember how far I've come from a year ago. I am able to do just about everything for myself now and rely only a little on outside help. For me, this return to independence has been very uplifting, and I have learned so much over the course of this past year.

I have always been comfortable with being by myself, and prized my privacy. However, I had to let go of most of my privacy by allowing others to come into my home to help me out. I had to leave my door unlocked so that they could get in, and people were coming into my space many times a day. My life became an open book. At first this was very difficult to deal with, but over time I became used to it, and even enjoyed the diversions during the day.

Allowing others into my world held some really great rewards for me. The first was that I had to reach out to others and actually ask for help. For someone as fiercely independent as I am, it didn't come easily, but it helped me to learn that it is not a sign of weakness to ask for help, and that people actually WANT to help and it gives them a good feeling in doing so.

I have a tendency to isolate myself and spend long periods alone with just my thoughts. This is a dangerous place to be. Not being allowed to isolate was another reward for me. When you're alone, and your thoughts tend to gravitate toward the negative, they can spiral downhill rapidly without someone to counter those thoughts. I have received enormous amounts of support from family, friends and therapists during this past year. Just having them around has been a constant source of light in my life. The big surprise for me was that I am not quite the loner that I thought I was!

I know I will continue to have challenges and disappointments on my journey to recovery, but I will also lean on the people around me and learn many more life lessons along the way.

~Eileen

Inching Forward

It is now almost 3 months since surgery on my left hip. Progress has been slow but it has been building steadily.

I have many exercises to do daily and they include upper and lower body strengthening, stretching by using weights and therabands, and resistive exercises. Resistive exercise might sound funny, but I sit with my feet flat on the floor and my knees apart. I push in with my knee, while holding my hand against it, so that it is harder to do. I do this both pushing in and out. I also add some standing exercises where I hold the back of a chair and stand on tiptoes and back onto my heels. From that position, I also kick out my left leg and hold it there to a count of 5, then repeat 10-20 times.

I had permission to use a walker and crutches, but recently I have been gradually testing out a cane. I am VERY slow with it, and not very confident. I didn't realize how dependent I had become on the comfort of the walker. Funny, I despise that thing, and can't wait to get rid of it, but it holds security for me.

I have another appointment with the surgeon in a couple of weeks and I'll have an x-ray. I am hoping that this visit will confirm my suspicions that things are going forward as they should!

~Eileen

After Surgery

This is a picture of a rainbow from my window at the rehab hospital, the evening before I left to come home.

I had surgery on May 12 to repair my fractured, impacted hip with great results. I had a bone graft done and a total hip replacement. I had to wait 9 months to get the surgery, and I am now feeling like it was worth the wait. When I stand now (although I'm not supposed to) I don't lean anymore! Both of my legs match in length again.

I don't remember much about the first several days post op. I do have a couple memories of them getting me out of bed and how heavy my leg felt and how much pain I was in. They got me out of bed every day and I was faithful about doing breathing exercises every 2 hours. By the 5th day they were ready to send me on my way and off I went to a rehab hospital. By this time, my hip was already starting to feel better than at any time since I had broken it!

My six days at rehab were great. I went kicking and screaming but soon found myself enjoying it very much. The staff made me feel welcomed and good about any progress that I made and there was lots of laughter and work. They even incorporated elements of their pulmonary rehab program into my PT and OT programs. This particular hospital actually has an inpatient pulmonary rehab program and if I should have an exacerbation and need pulmonary rehab, I will certainly do that.

I had PT and OT and nurse visits for about 3 weeks after I returned home. The nurse would check my vital signs and assess my suture line, which was healed by the time I got home. PT and OT did exercises with me and just a couple of weeks ago, put me on hold until I get permission to progress with weight bearing. So I spend about a half hour to 45 minutes each day doing exercises on my own.

So that is my journey so far. I hope to be walking by fall, but that's getting ahead of myself and I will continue to exercise so that I'm ready when the day arrives!

~Eileen

Where I'll be

After 9 long months, I will be having surgery on May 12 to repair my broken hip. They will do a bone graft and total hip replacement.


I have just begun to feel better, walking better with crutches, no longer taking pain pills, & moving around more, so I am kind of sorry to give all that up again. But I will be very happy to be on the other side of this and I am looking forward to walking on my own again, hopefully within the next 6 months.



I have needed a lot of help over the past 9 months, and it was a good lesson to teach me how to ask and accept it. I have always been the caretaker, not the one needing it, and I was too proud to ask. Throughout all of this time, I learned that there were people who needed to help me as much as I needed their help. This has been a very humbling experience and I will always be grateful for the life lesson.

I am ready to fight to gain back what I've lost to deconditioning. My doc already has told me I have an excellent attitude and will do well surgically so it's onward I go!



I'll see you on the other side of this.

~Eileen

Where I have been

I don't know where to begin. I haven't blogged and I haven't been online much in the past 5 months. I'm going to just give the very short version so I don't bore everyone to tears with my tale of woe.

In August, I tripped in my livingroom as gracefully as I knew how, and fell, breaking my right shoulder and my left hip. I walked on my broken hip for several days until I could no longer stand the pain and went back to the ER. The ER had never x-rayed the hip because they gave me so much morphine that it didn't hurt anymore! It had been 10 days and they discovered serious damage to my hip because I walked on it. It wasn't just broken, it was, well, traumatized is the best word I can come up with.

After a LONG separation from my home while I was in the hospital and then in rehab, my hip is still not healing. My shoulder is coming along okay. I walk with a walker and sometimes crutches but using the crutches just leaves me so much more breathless. I have been home since the end of October and have been out of my house twice since then. You can imagine my state of mind these days.

I haven't had surgery yet on my hip because there hasn't been any healing at all there. My orthopedic surgeon told me it would be about 6 months before something could be done. I will need a custom piece that they can fit a hip replacement to. I have been referred to a large teaching hospital near Boston, where I will see the head of the ortho department. That is on the 31st of this month, so I am hoping that they will be able to do what my ortho surgeon doesn't feel qualified enough to do.

I am very deconditioned and discouraged. I can get along okay in my apartment with help from my family and a great neighbor family who all pitch in so that someone is over a couple of times a day. There's no doubt that I would be in an institution were it not for all of them!

So that's where I've been this fall and winter. Of course this is all taking much too long in my estimation but I'm looking forward to being able to walk again and get back to rehab to get some more breath.

~Eileen