Survival tips: my bed

A few adjustments I made. Just sharing for fun. And if someone finds it useful.

My bed

The Pillow Wall

I arranged my pillows to form a pillow wall to prop up my arm and keep me from rolling onto my bad shoulder. Basically took my two firmest pillows, stacked them, and placed them to the side going lengthwise along the bed instead of widthwise at the top. The rest of my pillows are at the top where pillows normally are. This allows me to extend my arm and keeps me from rolling over in my sleep. Yes I have a lot of pillows. My ex used to complain about it. So glad he is gone from my life! These pillows make a much better partner!

The Dimmer Cord

I have an extension cord dimmer switch so I can adjust the light without having to reach. See that lamp on the bedside table in the background? It was too far away. The dimmer cord is basically an extension cord you can plug one thing into, controlled by a dimmer switch, and enough length that you can keep the dimmer close to you even if the plug and lamp are not. I got this when my kid (now grown and away at university) was a baby, to use in the nursery when he fell asleep in my arms. I have no idea where I bought this one so many years ago, but this dimmer cord is pretty much the same.

The Bedside Box

That bedside table, so near yet so far. Couldn’t get to it without leaning on my arm. Couldn’t move it to the other side of the bed, as there’s a dresser there. Can’t move that, and it’ too high and too far to use as a bedside table. So, I put a cardboard box on top of my wastepaper basket for a makeshift reachable bedside table. Because it is a box, things stay inside/don’t fall off. It is ugly, but who cares! It works and cost nothing!

Actually, none of these solutions cost me anything; they’re just stuff I had on hand. But they have been so helpful to me!

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.

Learning my limits

Wow, yesterday was horrible!

A 2½ hour morning meeting at 9 o’clock, and then my boss said, “Let’s do a 10 minute huddle before the meeting for our team,” so that was scheduled for 8:30. I had a bad night sleep-wise, but dragged myself to my laptop for 8:30, figuring I’d have time to make coffee between the huddle and the meeting. After waiting a couple of minutes, my other team-mate appeared and said, “Did you see boss’s email? They can’t start till 8:40.” Then they started telling me about a traumatic event they experienced over the weekend. Boss eventually joined as well, and our huddle ran right up to 9 o’clock, and I tried to grab some coffee and breakfast but was called back. So, 2½ hour meeting on half a cup of coffee and no food. 

By an hour in, I was experiencing nausea, tremors, and heart palpitations. My body temperature went up. I felt on the verge of a panic attack. I turned off my camera and lights so I could put my head down and just listen, but then someone shared a PowerPoint so I had to open my eyes again. By the time we got a little snack break almost 2 hours in (2½ for me, because of the huddle that wasn’t) I was sobbing. As soon as the meeting was over I lay down on the sofa with my eyes closed for about 45 minutes. 

And of course, I had another meeting to get through, my regular one-on-one with my boss. I started by letting them know that it had been too much for me in the morning, and they offered to reschedule, but I said that there were a couple of things I needed their input on. After briefly touching on one, they pivoted to talk about their own project, which has a lot of people involved and keeps changing, and invited another person to the meeting. It got really confusing for me at that point, and at one point my boss made the comment that they should be able to just hand the details to me and they can’t. I felt a bit blamed for my injury, but I was so tired at the time I just felt fairly apathetic about it.

Now I’m wondering about how to approach an upcoming team meeting, which is always a big headache (long, lots of attendees, lots of details that aren’t specifically relevant to my work and very jargonny to the point where it feels like a foreign language). And this meeting usually gets rescheduled repeatedly. I really want to say “Hey, I can’t do more than one hour, and I need 30 minutes buffer on either side, so if you’re going to change the time of meetings I need an hour’s notice so that I can adjust the rest of my schedule,” but I wonder how that would go over.

I feel a bit better today (although I cried a bit typing this) because I woke up with the sun and was able to eat breakfast outside on the front porch, soaking up some vitamin D. Can’t wait for my full-spectrum SAD therapy light to arrive.

Doctors hate her for this one simple trick

A month since I posted? Whoops!

I have been keeping up with walking, cycling, and trying to tap. I am no Ann Miller, but I like to think I’m less bad than when I started?

Anyway, here’s a little chart showing my weight change over the past year. It’s a comfort to see it all laid out—a consistent downward trend, as long as I keep tracking! Other things I think help: remembering vitamins, eating meat every day for iron, getting good sleep, and therapy. Where my feelings are at makes a huge difference in how I take care of myself. I don’t sleep well when I’m anxious. And if I don’t go to bed on time, I’ll eat junk food. 

I guess that’s my number one heath thing: sleep. Without good sleep, everything else falls apart—I feel anxious, I don’t exercise, and I eat junk. 

But they’re all interconnected. I sleep better when I exercise and do my therapy homework. I eat better when I do those things, too. But I can’t/don’t do them if I haven’t been getting good sleep.

Or maybe my number one thing is vitamins. If I don’t take my vitamins and iron, I am ravenous. And especially without iron, I get restless legs, which keeps me up. 

I guess maybe everything is my number one? I guess I should abandon the idea of a “number one” altogether!

There is no one. There is only all, interconnected.

November reset

I hit my goal weight on my goal day! Yay me! And then Hallowe’en happened, with its stress over costume-making, lack of sleep, and abundance of candy. So I’m in reset mode, to get my healthy habits back on track (especially sleep!). Thank goodness as well for the end of daylight savings, so mornings aren’t quite as grim as they were.

So far, so good. After a week, I’m back to where I was. Biggest thing I think has been tap. My instructor suggested using a metronome instead of music—to be able to fine-tune the tempo—and it also allows me to focus more on the rhythm without getting distracted by the melody. I have been practising so much more, feel like I might be making progress (at least I know what mistakes I am making and why, now), and I definitely feel the difference in my lower body—both in how the muscles feel, and how my clothes fit. It really does not take much to make a difference, and it is so much fun!