The Waiting Game

Oh the wait. The tedious, careful wait. This part has been challenging so far. My doctor had warned me that after a good post-op appointment, patients tend to overdue it. Being the perfect angel that I am, I thought that armed with this information, avoiding poor behavior would be easy. Of course, I discovered that nothing’s ever black and white, and that this turned out to be much more difficult than I predicted. As a review, I’m going to remind everyone what I was told to do after my last appointment on the 19th of January. I’m to add 10 minutes of talking each day, but I can only speak up to 10 minutes at a time... so even if I’m up to 2 hours a day, keep the talking to 10 minutes. Next, I was told to do nothing that would make me breathe hard or grunt. Hm. So... no snowboarding. The other requirements are the obvious “don’t speak over loud noises or yell across the house” etc. Easy, right? Well... let me explain where I’ve run into problems...

First of all, none of this is good for the social life. I’ll go into that more in my next blog because that’s a whole story on it’s own, but the fact is that my voice recovery will be lasting much longer than people realize. They see me and hear me speaking, and think I can go back to doing everything normal. People are offended if I don’t respond verbally to them, and they call to me from another room as if expecting me to yell back. 

Another problem is how much better I feel! After a couple weeks of being allowed to speak, I felt so much better that I thought the wound must have healed, and now I was working on building up the muscle. While I still avoided activities like snowboarding, (believing the cold air still wouldn’t be good for me), I had begun doing a low cardio workout everyday. Sitting on the couch so much during recovery was starting to make me crazy so I just did a light one hour workout every day. When I started vocal therapy back up a couple days ago, she informed me that my wound was still healing and that any hard breathing could potentially cause my throat to heal abnormally or cause a hemorrhage, and scar tissue. This was mortifying to me because here I promised to be a perfect patient, and I didn’t even realize I’d been risking hurting my throat! It was a nice wakeup call. She told me to at least wait another week (when I have my second post-op) to do anything active. 

I’m finding that a good recovery isn’t always about people being good patients or not. I thought that since it means so much to me, I would be perfect, but I allowed my senses to trick me. Just because it’s been forever and I feel really well, doesn’t actually mean I am well. It’s important to remain excited to get better, but not TOO excited! Now I’m cutting back and taking it easy again. This poor couch is now shaped perfectly to my body, but if that’s what it takes to sing again, call me an Idaho couch potato.