Finding An Interest Or Hobby – Sepsis Recovery

Lets talk about Finding An Interest Or Hobby – Sepsis Recovery!

Although I knew it was going to take me ‘a while’ to recover after escaping hospital, I had no warning or real understanding of what this would actually entail. All I was told was that I was ‘going to be very tired’ – lol, a bit of an understatement. As I went along I came to understand that my recovery wasn’t going to take weeks or months, but that it could take YEARS!!!!! This is big humungous amount of overwhelm to deal with.

Heres the thing, if I had known upfront some of what I might have been in for and given some sort of coping mechanism I might have been able to prepare myself better mentally. So if you are recovering from Sepsis, then here’s what I’m going to tell you – FIND AN INTEREST OR HOBBY!

Now you’re going to say, yeh right! But I have chronic fatigue, I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus, my brain doesn’t work, my body is in a mess, I’m in pain and I could cry. And thats for those of us who got away lightly – what about those who’s organs now don’t work or you have sadly lost body parts. How the heck can we find a hobby? So I can only tell you about my own experience and what I found helped me in the early weeks.

Too Noisy

I wasn’t really able to get out of bed for the first two months. The first few weeks were the worst. Still seriously ill and lying around all day with just your thoughts to keep you company is not a recipe for calm. I tried initially to watch the TV, but to be honest I could neither concentrate or focus on the screen AND it was just too much noise. I couldn’t deal with it, the images moved to fast and made me feel sick. I preferred the peace and quiet to be honest.

Now I have heard a number of survivors in the groups I’m in talking about finding the radio quite comforting. To have it on in the background and maybe swopping between channels that have music all day with those that have more talking shows in them. To be honest I never thought of trying the radio as its normally only something I would have listened to in my car. So you could give that a go. Likewise I didn’t try listening to music either. I think though my brain actually needed the silence to heal, as noise really seemed to irritate me.

Even the noise of the children after a while was sometimes unbearable. They are both little, Ruby is 8 and Rosie is 5. They would come in and visit after school and tell me about their day. This was no problem and they are highly entertaining and it would cheer me up. But then they would start carrying on and once the noise level escalated I would have to evict them from my room.

Couldn’t Read

So then I thought, OK, I need something quiet to do. I know I’ll read! In my life before Sepsis running a busy goldsmithing and mentoring business I NEVER had time to read. So I thought this would be a great way to relax, pass the time and catch up on some novels I’ve always wanted to read. WRONG!!!!!!! This was almost as bad as trying to focus on the TV.

I tried to start with a thriller. Bizarrely I didn’t think about it till later, but the first book I chose was titled ‘Make Me’ – a Jack Reacher novel by Lee child and it was set in a small town called ‘Mother’s Rest’. LOL! But the book did NOT ‘make me’ take a rest by any means. I must’ve read the first two pages over and over again about 20 times and none of it sank in. My brain was just too foggy and I was forgetting what I had read by the end of the next sentence. It was so frustrating and actually quite depressing really.

So I had a bit of a freak out. And thats when I turned to my ipad and started to ‘research’ about Sepsis and Pneumonia. Well thats not quite the truth. First I started trawling facebook just to have something to do, but you can only do that for so long. I found that if I turned the brightness off the screen down it didn’t hurt my head as much. I typed in ‘Sepsis’ and off I went….LOL! That kept me entertained for quite a few weeks.

Ipad

I found that by using the ipad for short times whilst in bed and ‘skimming’ articles to begin with, I was able to build up my concentration span. Sometimes I had to read the same article a couple of times but I saved them in a list so I could go back. I was also learning about what had happened to me and this gave me a focus.

Now I have to say that sometimes this information was overwhelming especially when I started to read other survivor stories. There were a few tears shed along the way. But it gave my day a purpose. I then stumbled upon a couple of Facebook support groups online and these were a great place to ask questions and to read what other people where talking about. These helped me to not feel alone. To know there were many ‘others’ out there who had been through similar experiences was very reassuring, especially as I felt there was no form of local support from my GP.

Other Low Level Energy Tasks

As I got stronger I was able to try other types of activities – all low energy tasks that didn’t involve me exerting myself physically. I tried to think of things I could do in bed in my pyjamas – cause I pretty much lived in pyjamas for 2 months. I’m going to talk about these in another post.

What types of activities did you try initially that helped you pass the time and keep your brain-fog mind occupied?

#brainfog #hobbies #mysepsisjourney #sepsisvitality #lifeaftersepsis