One thing after another!

Be warned this is kinda gross. The yucky pics are at the bottom of this post; if you don’t want to see them, don’t scroll all the way.

After my fall I got a fitness watch so I could track my heartrate and know when to take a break before things got too far. I am including this pic mainly so one of the gross pics doesn’t end up being the thumbnail for this post.

Mainly putting this pic here as a buffer

The watch was suggested by my concussion pal. Current wisdom says that rather than avoiding everything completely when you have concussion, it’s better to do a little bit, rest a little bit. But take that rest break before you are really feeling that you need it (i.e., before you get symptoms, like headache and nausea in my case).

It’s pretty basic, but does the job. Or, did the job. It was wild to see my heartrate spike to 132 as I slowly shuffled around the grocery store, occasionally needing to lean against the shelving when I lost my balance. It was set to warn me if my heartrate went above 100 or below 50 (I got warned for both of those!) For the first two weeks, it regularly warned me that my resting heartrate (50) was too low, and now it’s happier with me because my resting heartrate is more normal (60). My sleep is crappy and irregular, but no surprise there.

It was also “fun” to count my steps. I’ve never been a pedometer person, but it was instructive to see my daily average of 600 steps climb to 1,200 steps. Just 9,000 more and I’ll be an average sedentary person!

Anyway I’ve been wearing it for three weeks now, taking if off to bathe. 

As my shoulder gets a little better, I can do more with my left hand as long as it isn’t weightbearing (I’ll post about exercises and physio later). One thing I’ve done is go back to two-handed typing. I can only do it for a little while though, and then I start to feel sore. Today I figured out why.

(This is where it gets yucky!)

My skin is rubbing off under the watch strap. I swear it was not like this two days ago! But now I am rubbed raw.

For the time being, my fitness watch has been replaced by ointment and bandages. Photos of my wounds below, so I can find them if I need to show them to one of the docs. I can’t figure out a way to “spoiler” them, so consider yourself warned and stop reading now if you don’t want to see! No more heartrate tracking for me, I guess. It just seems to be one thing after another these days and I am tired of it. 

So that’s why it’s so tender

I had a different worse gross extra problem last week that I don’t even want to talk about.