By: Yemi Alade, Director, Pharmacy Operations
Dealing with illness or injury can be terrifying. Healing takes time and patience and managing your expectations through the process is important for the healing process. It is important to follow the instructions and recommendations of your surgeon, physical therapists, and other healthcare providers. Your body needs time to go through the healing process before you resume your normal physical activities. After surgery, allow the body time to heal and protect yourself from further injury by not pushing yourself too fast and too hard. When undergoing physical therapy, it is crucial to realize that progress takes time and effort. Patients are encouraged to have patience with both themselves and the process.
One of the challenges of recovery is having the patience to try hard even when the required effort seems overwhelming and motivation to do the exercises is low. People need to have patience with their progress and not get discouraged when recovery is slow or painful. Developing patience can be challenging since it requires both a delay of gratification and an exercise of self-control and discipline. One way to develop patience when healing is to engage in episodic future thinking. This means you imagine yourself accomplishing positive goals at different upcoming dates – a day, a week, a month, six months, and a year later. Episodic future thinking improves your ability to exercise patience and to focus on the rewards of full and complete recovery.
Have patience with all things, but first with yourself – Saint Francis De Sales
