ME Clinic - 2nd Appointment

Well yesterday I had my second appointment where I took along my activity diaries.
But before we looked at those, I was asked to do some exercises - basically a short walk across the room then a one minute stair climb (up and down four steps consistently) and then a two minute continual corridor walk. The physio did advise me that I could have short stops or stop completely if I felt tired, so there was no real pressure but of course you know me... I had also just walked ten minutes from the bus stop to the hospital so I did feel quite worn out! She took my resting pulse and then checked it again after each exercise. I had to rate how difficult I had found the exercises on the Borg scale (see below). Basically the number you rate on the Borg scale x 10 should correlate to your pulse rate However although my pulse rate was 104 after the stair climb I rated it at around 16 which should have meant my pulse was 160. Apparently this is pretty common with ME sufferers and shows how easily fatigued we get with exercise.

Onto the activity diaries. Here is my week:  

 So as you can see there are large chunks of orange (medium energy activity) and not a lot of green (low energy) or rest interspersed with them, so the physio was quite strict with me! She suggested some ways of looking at my week and how i could incorporate more restful activities and be a little kinder to myself. But she took a pretty person centred approach, encouraging me to analyse my week and see what changes could be made. So today I have been a lot more mindful of how i need to stop thinking that I 'should' be doing things and look at balancing my day more, putting my health first. Simple changes like having a relaxing lunch, making sure I take my allocated 1/2 hour and listening to relaxation music on the bus instead of having the radio on while flicking through twitter and facebook on my smartphone - a recipe for brainfog! can reduce orange to green. The only difficulty I had was with her comment that I can't be spontaneous and every activity needs to be considered carefully - in other words keeping to a routine!

My sleep had been a bit out of kilter with thinking about the house move so I've been a lot stricter with myself the last few nights; having a camomile tea and not using the computer or my phone 1/2 hour before bed.

Next time I think we will look more at how adrenaline affects the body and the 'starter-finisher'; two subjects that will be very useful to me!

It seems like the topics being covered are pretty similar to other ME/CFS clinics. It would be great to hear your experiences - feel free to share!