Tips on navigating an abundance of hospital time
Along with all the nausea and mouth ulcers, boredom is a side effect of chemotherapy and extended periods of time in hospital. As someone who is not very good at sitting still, I really struggled with the week long hospital stays and was consistently emotionally crushed every time I wasn’t allowed home on my expected discharge date.
It’s ok to have downtime, it’s also important to rest and allow your body and mind time to recover from treatment. Even though hospital isn’t necessarily the nicest place in the world, it is still a great time to catch up on sleep (as hard as it may be with the distractions) give yourself a break, read a book, binge Netflix, facetime friends or whatever you’d like to do in that time.
Initially, I created to-do lists to occupy my days in hospital, as I do in everyday life, I’m one of those people who gets a great sense of satisfaction from productivity. I’ve come to learn, this is often disheartening in a hospital context as you don’t know how fatigued/motivated you will feel each coming day and in hospital, you’re unfortunately not as in control of your day as you are in the real world.
Some things I do to keep myself busy
Sudoku’s (I’ve honestly done over 200 in 2021)
Work when I am feeling up to it. I take my laptop to another area of the hospital to break up the day
Listen to podcasts
Scroll through my phone - a lot more than I should
Rehab + general exercise (many hospitals are fantastic these days and have the exercise physiologists or physiotherapists that you can see while in hospital and can offer guidance on how to keep moving throughout treatment.)
Read
Nap
Walk around and explore - I try to spend minimal time in bed when not napping, this is a personal choice as I’m trying to trick myself into wanting to return to my room at the end of the day.
Something my psychologist suggested that really helped me was shifting my perspective to view the time to rest as productive, then when I can be home with friends and family hopefully I’ll feel grateful for the time I’ve had to recuperate and have sufficient energy levels to enjoy quality time. Another mindset shift that my psychologist taught me that I personally found really helpful was detaching emotion from dates. For example, rather than ‘I really hope I can go home Friday night so I can see my friends who are catching up Saturday morning’ trying to tell myself ‘I’m glad I get to go home for the weekend whenever that may be.’ I’ve also found thinking about things I would do regardless of where I’m physically located useful, eg. ‘I’ll watch the new episode of … this weekend.’ If my blood count isn’t high enough for discharge from hospital, as upset as I inevitably am, telling myself I’d be doing the same activity if I home sometimes makes me feel a little better about it.
This is hard and I have by no means mastered this skill but letting go of the mentality of being married to deadlines has become important for me to continue working on.
As with everything I’ve shared so far, please consider that these tips are what both surprised and helped me throughout my journey. I’m incredibly grateful to have had a fantastic psychologist support me throughout and who has identified areas of improvement for me. I cannot recommend enough the importance of having a trained psychologist help you to navigate this time.