Today at Physical Therapy I was informed I need to learn to breathe correctly again. Apparently, I have not been breathing the right way. I have been using my upper body muscles and not my diaphragm and stomach muscles. I guess I had not realized the change. I had a lot of difficulty breathing after the mastectomy last year and perhaps to compensate I stopped breathing correctly. My therapist says that I am taking short little breaths. This tells her that I am using my pectoral and neck muscles and not my diaphragm to breathe.
My "homework" for the week is to lie on my back while I practice breathing from my gut and do a series of left arm exercises. We are working on my left pectoral muscles which feel very strange and out of place. It is hard to describe, I can feel them much more prominently than the right side muscles. It is very bizarre. There are moments that I feel like I have to shift them back into place. Very strange feeling to have.
On a positive note, I did my second pool workout this morning. Albeit, it is a far cry from what my workouts used to be, it was still very nice to be in the water again. I missed being in the water the most these past ten months. Having the water flow over my body as I glided underwater down the pool was a wonderful familiar feeling - with a little weirdness. The area around my implant and my pectoral muscle felt strange. Almost as if I could feel the liquid in the implant move along with the water of the pool that flowed over it. Crazy. It was a very slow workout that consisted mostly of kicking with a few laps of breast stroke in between. I did try to do some crawl, but I have very little arm rotation in my left arm (about 40%). And, my pectoral muscle feels very weird when I tried to do even my little crawl stroke. So much to get used to again. I did manage to do 2300 yards, which I am sure my therapist and doctors will think is too much.
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