Struggle to Adjust Out of Surviving to Live and Live Life.

     I am now 8-10 months post transplant and life began to settle into a rhythm. One that looking back was not productive but I was happy and complacent. I was not trying to push myself as much as I should have been in my career goals and physical goal. I did not revert to feeling worse or my new heart was giving me problems, however I could not escape the lingering feeling when doing activities that something bad would happen.

     I felt like I was still in the mindset of surviving to live and not living to survive. What I mean by that is I became cautious when pushing my heart rate higher when exercising and stimulating my mind. I had the energy but did not have the drive to pursue my goals. From working on my coding projects and pushing myself to learn to physically pushing myself to stretch my workouts longer to strengthen my new body.

     In terms of coding and doing more work, I would choose to play video games or just sit around and watch movies/shows like I did before my heart transplant. Many times I would feel bad after but would continue the same behavior.

     For working out I found that my muscles for years did not have enough oxygen to promote muscle growth and in time they became weakened. So far I have been trying to build that back up and get endurance to a level that was maybe 60 % before heart failure. This has been something that was hard to wrap my head around and accept that I needed to set the foundation first before moving forward to gain muscle mass and get back to do doing the things that I enjoyed physically.

     I am writing this looking back at that time and appreciate the ability to rest and do these activities but also I wish that I did put more effort into, developing projects and goals met than I did during this time.