Hospitalizations are rough. I just got out from spending about 12 days in the hospital. It disconnects you from friends, family and the outside world. Instead of dealing with physicians who know you well, you are left bringing an unfamiliar doctor up to speed on possibly decades of health history. Those can be unsettling forms of disconnect. Everything that is going on in your life is brought to a halt: I was supposed to be in New York City for a fundraiser for the documentary for which I’m the associate producer. I was supposed to be doing work for my graduate school program. I was supposed to be home for my dad’s birthday. I was supposed to be partaking in pre-wedding rituals as a bridesmaid for my cousin’s upcoming wedding. I was supposed to be finding a way to focus on me.
Leading up to this hospitalization, I had been working on enhancing my personal wellness. Ever since I became abruptly ill with a respiratory infection that lasted for almost two months this past September, my health hadn’t bounced back. I was dragging in energy, yet in my life with my various projects, I couldn’t be happier or feel more settled. I realized that my usual two cups of coffee a day had skyrocketed to five cups or more. Instead of taking a nap or slowing down when my body told me to, I would grab a mocha instead. My heart rate has always been fast, but one day I woke up and realized that I wasn’t helping matters and decided to cut the caffeine completely. I drink caffeine-free teas or decaf coffee instead. Surprisingly, the change wasn’t that much of a challenge, although taking a nap here or there was a little different, and I’ve felt better overall. I stopped pushing my body to the limit and began listening to what it needed instead.
For a while, I’ve realized the importance of meditation in my life. I found a guided meditation app that slowly helps you build toward a more consistent meditation practice. You start out meditating for 10 minutes and then, over a few weeks, build up toward 20 minutes. Once you achieve that goal, different portions of the app are unlocked, and specific meditation sessions address goals ranging from tapping into creativity to achieving better sleep. I’d like to build toward meditating for 20 minutes twice a day. It seemed at first like a lot of time to set aside, but then I realized that I set aside time for so many things. If I can’t set aside 40 minutes a day toward building personal wellness, then I need to reflect on where I’m at in my life. I was so glad I started this practice before my hospitalization, because it allowed me a few moments to regroup from a stressful situation, combined with feeling unwell and sometimes having pain.
Even though I had been focusing on being well, my parents intervened on something that made for a much smoother hospitalization this time: They did not bring my laptop to the hospital. I had my phone, so I was able to send e-mails and explain that I would be off the grid for a bit. This was the first time I’d been mostly disconnected from technology. I could still send and receive messages from friends to keep a much-needed social connection, but I couldn’t push myself beyond what my body was capable of. My parents had seen me spend so many other hospitalizations not resting and instead attempting to juggle all my obligations. After these hospitalizations, I struggled to recover health-wise and felt overwhelmed by any and all obligations. Did anything bad happen because I put some things on hold? No. If anything, I’m able to return to all my tasks with more energy than if I’d struggled to accomplish them when I should’ve been taking care of myself.
In my post-hospitalization days, it’s been a bit slow-going. It’s easy to think that I can be right where I was before I became ill. Going from being in bed and having food brought to you, to doing stairs in your house and making yourself lunch can be a shocking transition for the body. Instead of throwing myself right back into where I was, I’m adding things bit by bit. For the first day or two at home, I continued my technology disconnect. While I’m usually writing a lot of the time, I instead edited something small. The next day, I worked on writing something new, but not the quantity I usually write. I tried to read a little bit for enjoyment before delving into something I’d need to read for analysis.
It’s as if I’m retraining my body to get back to where it was. You wouldn’t just expect to walk normally on a leg that had a cast on it for weeks. Why, then, do we push ourselves with less visible health complications when we know we just aren’t there yet? Every moment we spend taking time for ourselves when our health isn’t up to par will benefit each of us in the long run. Sometimes we need those moments to disconnect to really realize how much we aren’t connecting with ourselves.