A Year of Recovery

I had to spend a week in the hospital (just over) one year ago for a serious medical operation. It was brutal in many ways. I woke up in the worst pain I hope I will ever feel, so bad that all my vision was all orange when I opened my eyes. The initial pain medication helped a lot, but I was still in too much pain to sleep much during that entire week, even on large doses of pain medication and sleeping pills. Even after I left the hospital, I often struggled to sleep because of pain, and would have to wake up halfway through the night to take more pain meds. I remember in mid December, 41 days after the surgery, I had my first brief moment without pain. Constant pain is mentally and physically exhausting in ways I had never experienced before. Thankfully I got through it with a lot of help from my friends. I had people visit me every day in the hospital and as frequently as possible once I went home. Especially when I couldn't walk far or at all, these visits helped so much. People also helped me in other ways, like bringing me food, since I couldn't stand for too long to cook for myself. My only regret is that I stopped accepting help too soon. I wish now that I had let people keep helping me. If you ever go through anything like this, my biggest piece of advice is to plan for more time off than you think you need, and don't be afraid to ask for help with things, even when you don't necessarily "need" it.

Since I've been wearing my smart watch this entire time, I have access to a lot of health metrics. It's interesting for me to look at these metrics and think about how they relate to my internal feelings and experience with recovery. So, to celebrate one year of recovery, I decided to use these metrics to reflect. The chart belowis meant to resemble a quilt, because I'm stitching together all these metrics, and because I spent a lot of time in bed while recovering. Each square of the quilt is one metric during one time frame. I chose the time frames based on how I split up this year when I talk to people about it, so they aren't equal numbers of days. The metrics at the top of the column are the ones I feel most positively about during that time frame, and the ones at the bottom are the ones I feel most negatively about. The different colours represent the different metrics. Green is the number of steps taken, red is the number of intensity minutes, purple is my resting heart ratem blue is my sleep score, pink is my weight, and orange is my stress level. Some of these are aggregated and some aren't, just based on what represents how I feel about them. Some of the squares have notes in them if I thought there was something interesting to say, like some context, a milestone, or a frustration.

My biggest takeaway is how many ups and downs there are to recovery. Some things get better quickly, some things take ages to come back. Some things that got better quickly get worse again, and some things never get better at all.