Thoughts about Overcoming My Physical Health Challenges in Daily Life

Recently, I decided to clean on of the rooms in my relative’s home. It was very dirty, but after three hours I made huge progress and it looks and smells much cleaner. I though I was going very good energy wise, but after a while I slowly became very tired so I laid down to help stretch out my back. Three hours later, I woke up after a very long afternoon nap.

Fortunately, I didn’t need to do a lot of work for my day job that day, but wearing out that much made me feel very depressed. I had low energy and fatigue for many years due to my illness and my attempts to build my energy and stamina back up wore away my confidence in how much I healed. After my health improved, I believed I could do more than I ever was able to sick. I can do more than I used to, but I’m still prone to over straining myself and wearing myself out much faster than others I know.

The night after I cleaned my relative’s room, my left arm gave me fits. I had some serious problems with my left arm because the antibiotic resistant infection I suffered from created non cancerous tumors all over my body with the most affected area being my left arm and shoulder. Because of the size of the tumors, I have nerve damage, muscle tissue damage, and skin damage. Although I can lift my left arm and range of motion is improving, there is a visual difference in the size of the look skin on my left bicep, shoulder, and underarm area in comparison to my right arm. Scrubbing, lifting items, and other movements normally done while cleaning are great physical therapy for my arm, so pushing myself to clean was the best thing to do. Yet, while sitting on the couch with a heating pad, sweater, and trying to decide if topping everything with a blanket made me wonder if cleaning or pushing myself like I did is the best idea for me.

Rebuilding my stamina (And arm strength) is not easy and it takes my joy of healing away. It’s so easy to become pessimistic when these things happen, so I’m doing my best to keep myself optimistic during these times when I feel very down. Even though I felt very sad about how hard emotionally and mentally it is on me, to realize I’m still a ways away from being as strong as I want to be, I still didn’t want to give up making myself clean and do more physical things. It is for my overall good to push myself and not give up, but its in my overall good to take breaks and let my body rest and heal from what I pushed it to do.

Although I was in a lot of pain that night, after taking an anti inflammatory and sleeping, I felt much better. In fact, I felt so good, I decided to push my arm a little more and cleaned more areas of my relative’s home, using my left arm as the scrubbing arm. The only difference is I didn’t do as much as I did the day before. I still worked it enough to make it sore, but not enough to make it hurt as much as the day before.

The road to recovery from serious illness isn’t easy, but it is possible. Even if the things that are easy for someone to do are not easy after becoming ill does not mean they cannot do them again. They just need to do them differently. During the start of the pandemic, I was terrified to push myself to build strength because if I hurt myself too much, then I might need to go to the doctor… which terrified me even more. Now that things are calming down (At least, it looks that way) and there is a better understanding of Coronavirus/Covid-19, I feel much better about pushing myself to be more active and work my arm more than I used to.

Well, that’s all for now! Thank you for reading!