Thursday, July 09, 2009

Motivation


One of the hardest parts of rehab is staying motivated. I have been having trouble over the past month because I haven't been feeling so great. I had an infection and was on antibiotics and prednisone and just started another course of steroids with a slower taper. The doctor thinks that this time I might need to stay on a maintenance dose but I am hoping not to.

An exacerbation of COPD causes severe shortness of breath and that is just the hardest thing to deal with for me. Just going into the kitchen from my livingroom causes distress and the harder it is, the less I do it. The fear of the shortness of breath is profound. With COPD, the less you do, the less you can do.

This week is almost over, so next week I am going to get back to rehab while I'm on the prednisone and have some energy. I need to get over the fear and back to the exhilaration that I feel when I am doing something good for myself. If I stay stagnant, I get depressed and it's even harder to do anything.

I know that life can be good, and I want it back!

~Eileen

5 comments:

Lee said...

Hi, I recently found your blog and wanted to reach out. I'm the blog coordinator for EverydayHealth.com.

We're currently recruiting patients and experts to write a weekly blog post about COPD and I thought you might be interested.



Everyday Health has over 25 million monthly unique visitors to their website, and there is a lot of potential exposure and traffic to come from blogging with the market leader in online health information. It's also an excellent platform to promote awareness about COPD and any non-profits or other related entities.


Let me know if this is something that Better Living Well would be interested in and might like to talk more about.
 You can email me at lmcalilly (at) waterfrontmedia (dot) com.


Thanks so much!



Lee McAlilly

sol said...

For our medical/drug development classes of the ESBS (http://www-esbs.u-strasbg.fr), we had to work in groups to evaluate the currently developed drugs and medical studies, to organise, understand and put them into context. We used clinicaltrials.gov for this and a lot of papers. See here our most important result – the final presentation:
http://www.olenyi.de/?p=122
We worked with 7 students on that and evaluated 840 clinical studies. Maybe, this information can be of use for others - if you want more information, just contact us: mail@btmag.eu .

You may find it of interest for your blog...

Cheers

Sebastian

Unknown said...

Motivation is an important part of doing anything that is good for you these days. I read a very inspiring article from University of Colorado Hospital at http://www.medicalvoyce.com/articles/2011/04/copd-patient-going-strong-%E2%80%93-exercise-and-oxygen

At 71 this guy is very motivated.

Hummer said...

I was reading your article and find that these are really valuable tips. Lots of good information here on COPD.

tahera said...

Emotional post. Thank you for sharing your personal experience. stem cell for copd