recovery

The four stages of getting better

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I’m still getting on with my recovery, and I’m slowly regaining the ability to do tasks that I couldn’t do immediately after my fall. I’ve found that I go through four stages with tasks:

  1. I can’t do it myself
  2. I can’t quite do it myself
  3. I can just about do it myself
  4. I can do it myself confidently

I’m now eight and a half weeks post-fall, and most tasks are at stage 3 and 4 now. The things I can’t do myself involve stretching my arms up – namely, hanging washing outside. Indoors, I can use stepladders to help me reach things, but it’s more difficult outdoors.

There aren’t many things left in stage 2 – things I can’t quite do myself – but dressing myself was something I couldn’t do entirely myself until recently. My main issue was getting my head through t-shirts, and for this I needed assistance.

Stage 3 is when I can do something, but in a rather ungraceful way or with the help of additional tools. To take the example of dressing myself, I found that laying a t-shirt out on a bed, and then pushing my head through it like a cat going through a cat flap, seemed to work. Not graceful, but it gets the job done. Another example would be drying my back; I would lay the towel over the sink so that I could grab it with both arms.

It’s this third stage that has given me some insight into what it would be like to have a permanent mobility issue. I’m hopeful that I’ll make a full recovery, and regain all of my mobility (although it’s not guaranteed). But I appreciate for some, their limited mobility is the best that they can manage, and that’s where mobility aids and various life hacks come into play.

Jumping into July

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A photo of Conwy castle taken through the gap in the town wall.

Here we are, into the latter half of the year. I’m continuing to recover, and this month sees us go on our annual summer holiday.

Recovery update

I’m slowly regaining mobility in my arms, following my fall, and I’m generally in less pain now. I’m still not fully back to normal, but may be closer to normal mobility by the end of the month. At least I’ve been able to help out with more of the housework; Christine and I normally split tasks relatively evenly, so a lot has fallen on her.

This month should also see me returning to work in the office on occasional days – until now, all my work has been at home.

I have a bone density (Dexa) scan coming up this month, as for someone to break both arms in the way I did at my age is unusual. I expect it won’t show anything concerning but my GP wants me to have one anyway.

Summer holiday

In the latter half of the month, once the schools have broken up, we’re off for a week’s holiday in North Wales. We’re actually staying in the exact same place as last year – it was nice, convenient, and there are plenty of things that we didn’t get to do last time. In fact, my potential to-do list has enough for a potential third holiday next year, although I doubt we’ll make it three years in a row.

Weather permitting, we’d like to go up Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon), although we’ll probably be taking the train to do so. We also plan to go down some kind of mine one day, and visit the Welsh Mountain Zoo.

As I’m not currently permitted to drive, Christine will be doing all of the driving this time. Which part of me feels bad about; however, I did all of the driving on our 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 holidays, so maybe this will help balance things.

New tech

I mentioned at the start of the year that we’d be looking at getting a replacement laptop for home use. Christine bought one earlier this year, and now I have one on the way too so that we each have our own device. I’ll blog about it once it has arrived and I’ve had a chance to play with it.

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