Home remedies

Lighter dressings, beach training and healing in a heart beat

Back home from hospital, again. Happily discharged from my emergency stay a week or so ago, I’ve swapped the beeping and bustle of the Plastics Ward for the rolling waves of Paekakariki beach, the chirping birds from the flax outside my bedroom window and the occasional distant squeak of our puppy Fred chewing his rubber chicken. Better the chicken than my furniture. Or my foot.

To suit my medical requirements, I’ve annexed part of our bathroom as a medical base, stocked with a small arsenal of pills, potions, lotions and medical supplies. From here I conduct my daily ablutions, exercises and medicine-taking, nutrition-drinking and dressing changes. After all that, I unlock the door and emerge for a rest, or more likely a wrestle, with Mia and Fred.

Dressing down

Gradually, my dressings are lessening. My arm donor site, from whence my new palate was grafted, now has a slim-line dressing about a quarter of its size and mass of a month ago. After the first surgery, my forearm dressing / cast looked like the one they use for Police Dog Training for apprehending armed offenders. At home, Fred took a little too much of a liking to it.

So I’m less dressed, but with the essentials covered. I still have a hole in my neck, from the most recent tracheostomy, which needs a patch dressing changed every day or so. It’ll be healed in a couple of weeks, I’m told. Thankfully I no longer require the hole for breathing. Much easier for coordinating a cough, too. Up until a week ago, I needed to press the patch and pinch my nose in order to clear my throat. Leaving any of these outlets uncontrolled would led to messy results.

Stats extra:

Home is where the heart rests

An indicator of my home healing, and the ‘work’ being done since surgery, is the data on my resting heart rate. I’ve tracked this data daily for the past two years, for fitness tracking and training. When I’m fit and race-ready, my resting heart rate is approx 40-44 beats per minute (eg in Jan-Feb 2022, prior to racing The Goat). When I have an infection or have recently done a tough run, my resting heart rate spikes five to ten beats higher, a sign of the body working hard to repair itself. As I recover, over a period of days, the resting heart rate falls back.

You can see the relative impact of my surgery on Feb 23rd, shown in the far right of the chart below. My resting heart rate rose by about 25 beats per minute, or more than 30%, a much greater impact on my body than any mountain run I have ever done. It stayed around 67bpm for a few days, then slowly began to fall. You can also see that in terms of recovery, I’m on the down hill section now!

While I’m not quite ready to resume mountain race training, I did start this week with some daily stairs, and by taking Fred out for an evening trot along the beach. He’s an enthusiastic trainer but completely incapable of travelling in a straight line, racing off to waves or dunes, and sniffing out each half-buried stick on the beach as if each was a fresh bone. So, a straight 2km walk involves about 6km travel, as the dog flies. Still, as the All Blacks say, Champions do Extra.

Beach walks with Fred, a champion zigzagger. The path might look straightforward, but there is absolutely no chance of a direct route.

Returning to Plastics as an officially discharged Outpatient, on Monday. There were a few butterflies, but of the right sort - this one the logo of the GMRI, marking its work here.

Stair training at home this morning