Don’t walk and chew gum at the same time
- Saturday 12 November 2011
The breathlessness is really getting me down.
Tonight was the last straw.
I went to dinner to a restaurant. Once I got there and settled down, I was fine. But getting ready, walking outside, getting in the car, walking into the restaurant, walking to the table and so on was all too much. Huff, puff, huff, puff.
Came home from dinner and googled: could I find info about breathlessness for cancer patients?
Wow!
It turns out that there is serious, research-based, practical advice on how to breathe, how to walk, how to stand. There’s a fair bit of overlap between these three sites, but I found them all useful:
- My favourite cancer website has some good info on breathlessness
- Even better is the info from Macmillan on Managing breathlessness.
- Best of all, I found really useful, practical tips from BreastCancer.org.
In part: don’t walk and breathe at the same time. Rather: breathe in, walk, stop, breathe out. And: breathe in, then breathe out slowly with pursed lips. I just went downstairs and back using these tips. A hundred times easier than earlier this evening! Who would have thought such little things could make a big difference?
Since Day 1 I’ve been getting useful information from these three sites. I don’t know how I’d cope without them