Experience says to make your appointment so you’re the first one on the schedule in the morning or the first after their lunch hour.
Tom Sheppard
Do you ever feel like all you do is go to doctor’s appointments? Feel like a drug addict as you take meds all day long ? Make sure you are getting your daily dose of exercise? Sometimes it seems that there is no time left in your days to do anything else.
The other day I read a blog post on the Davis Phinney Foundation website by Tom Sheppard about making the most of your visits to your doctor. Tom does a wonderful job outlining 5 steps you can take maximize your 15 minutes with your doctor. As I read his list of doctors appointments in one year, I started to think about how much time I spend on doctors appointments and self-care. You can easily fill your days with unwanted tasks, all in the pursuit of living well with PD.
I knew I was seeing a lot of doctors, but when I actually looked at my calendar, I realized that I had more appointments than I thought I did. To sum up, in 2017 I saw
- 25 doctors
- 36 appointments
- 9 Physical Therapy appointments,
- 2 procedures
- 2 MRI’s, and other miscellaneous appointments.
We also traveled a lot, for a total of 17 weeks. Which means that I saw at least one doctor a week when I was home. It seems a bit excessive, doesn’t it?
Self care also includes exercise, which is essential, averaging an hour a day. In addition, we need to make sure that we have all of the medications that we take throughout the day, keep up with our health insurance claims and more. Record keeping is also an essential part of self care. The bottom line it that we spend a lot of time managing our own care. You must be an advocate for yourself to get the care you need. If you don’t have someone to help you, it is easy to become overwhelmed.
On a different topic, I don’t normally like to endorse products on my blog. But after a friend fell and ended up in the emergency room and no one there was familiar with her PD meds, I both decided it was time to get a medical ID bracelet. I found a great selection of fashionable ID bracelets on a website called Lauren’s Hope. I get a lot of compliments on my new “bracelet”. Check out their website by clicking on the photo here:
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