1. Everyone panics. It is amusing, then not so amusing to explain the “no, neither I nor the baby are currently in medical danger, this is a preventative thing” over and over.
2. Everyone offers to come by to entertain me or somehow make things easier, because I must be bored or unable to handle household stuff. I am someone who suffers from social stress, so again, this is amusing on one level, not so amusing on another because I have to keep turning people down. This social stress is partly an introvert thing, partly a fibro thing: dealing with people takes energy, something I have in short supply on a normal basis. (Jan calls this kind of social energy “teaspoons,” a variant on the spoon theory allegory of spoons representing the finite amount of available energy to someone with FM/CFS. I love the term; it combines the idea of social interaction with the basic allegory.) Also, I’ve got lots to keep me busy, namely work, which for various reasons like finances and deadlines can’t be dropped. And household stuff is already minimised.
3. Lying in bed/on the chesterfield is dull. Luckily, as Paze pointed out, most of my hobbies are rest-compatible: reading, spinning, knitting, and eventually weaving (although that last one is actually the most intensive of them all, and I will have to break it down to very basic, brief units). And there’s always work, which has never been an issue, because I don’t commute and make my own hours.
4. I am actually capable of getting myself drinks, snacks, making meals, doing light laundry, walking to the corner to meet the boy’s bus, brief cello sessions, and so forth. It’s not like when they chained me to an IV stand at the hospital last time and told me I couldn’t get out of bed for two months after stopping labour halfway through the process. By prescribing light bed rest, my doctor is looking to further reduce the amount of energy I’m expending in order to shunt as much as possible to the Owlet. What I am not allowed to do is go out and do, well, most stuff. Orchestra will be on a week-to-week basis, and I will be taking Wednesdays extra easy to save up energy for it. HRH will be driving the boy and I to cello lessons, which is ideal, because driving is one of the things that totally drains my energy and stresses me when I have two cello lessons back to back at which to pay attention.
5. After bbqing and watching kids run about yesterday with friends, which was very pleasant, I put myself on 24 hours of full bed rest to recover, because things were getting twingy at the end of the day. In bed at six o’clock! Awake at three o’clock, because my body said, “Well, we’ve been in bed for nine hours, that’s normal, so it must be time to get up!” Just for the record, body, that is not on. The 24 hours of full bed rest today was, alas, down(up?)graded to light rest again, though, because poor HRH got violently ill in the wee smas, with what I suspect is an HRH-sized version of the 24-hour tummy bug the poor boy had on Saturday. So I was up with the boy this morning after all and handling all of the morning stuff instead of the half I usually do.
All in all I’m doing very well so far. The clinic called me to go in to pick up two prescriptions and a requisition form for follow-up tests in two weeks the day after my last hospital appointment, which was ironic seeing as how it’s a 45-minute trip both ways and they obviously hadn’t yet gotten the news that I was on light bed rest. It can take a few days for info to trickle between the hospital and the clinic, I have discovered. This should no longer be a problem as I’m being followed at the hospital from hereon, though. Which means, alas, no more free clinic wi-fi while I wait hours past my appointment time. Sigh.