Everyone's health is garbage right now. Every other pediatrics call to the clinic: "My kid is sick all the time and it's not corona!" "that's because it's every illness all at once attacking your kid's immune system because we're all stressed out and dealing with corona!" It is genuinely demotivating. My yoga instructor flat-out said "you need to acknowledge that 'running' is a part of your life that's over." Nonetheless I ran three times last week. You have to be patient with yourself and acknowledge that any movement is better than no movement, and that if you get out of the house to so much as loop around the block, that's one loop around the block you wouldn't have made otherwise. You have to recognize that your body is dealing with special circumstances and that you need to grade on a curve. You're going to be tempted to judge yourself against yourself at your best. What you need to do is judge yourself against yourself last week, and acknowledge that there will be steps backward due to forces entirely beyond your control.
Thanks, I needed to hear that. I do feel torn between "listen to your body and take it easy / move less" and "keep on moving slowly and steadily", as I don't know what will work best in my recovery. You seem to be suggesting the latter, right? Because my inclination is to do the former.
I'm suggesting both. Do what you can, when you think you can do it, and celebrate that you did it rather than condemning that you didn't do enough. I'm not going to run three times this week. Maybe twice, maybe once. But I'm walking every damn day, often twice a day. Is it enough? not by a long shot. Is it what I got? It's what I can repeat, that improves my health, that's sustainable. Learned something dealing with my mom's bullshit. Medicare uses the acronym "RTB" for "Return To Baseline" to determine when they're kicking you out of physical therapy. For most of us? "Baseline" would be "all better." For Medicare? It means "you're within 20% of the asymptote it looks like you're going to hit." Medicare literally cuts you off from physical therapy as soon as you start to level off. You'd think that'd be a money decision but nah - the way the laws are written Medicare gets to claw back all the money they spent on you within five years of your death, and your heirs can't dispute any prices - now you know why medicine in the US is so expensive, considering 95% of your medical care is in the last six months of your life. There's recovery? And then there's slllllowwwwwwwwwwww recovery. With old people there's "RTB." I'm having to acknowledge that for purposes of Long Covid, I'm "old people" and every minor victory is a major one and it sucks. You? I'll bet you do better. But you gotta give yourself the permission to do it at a sustainable rate.
I have been trying to understand. 60% of my team has kids in 2-4 year old range, and they are constantly sick. Like, much more so than in normal years? The added part to this is that their parents (the people on my team) are now also nearly constantly sick because they keep catching whatever their kids get. It's a giant mess.Everyone's health is garbage right now. Every other pediatrics call to the clinic: "My kid is sick all the time and it's not corona!" "that's because it's every illness all at once attacking your kid's immune system because we're all stressed out and dealing with corona!"
Constantly sick. Combine that with the fact that schools now require you to take three days off if you so much as confess to a cough, that school schedules now have to be written around a dire shortage of staff and teachers and an entire cohort that learned (for two years!) that the Minimum Viable Product for "school" is "watch your teacher on a screen somewhere yammer about stuff that you won't be tested on". It's a shitshow. We'll be feeling the effects for a generation.