Comparing Rehab Programs

During our dinner with British Don last Friday evening, we talked about his first week in his cardiac rehab class. It was at the hospital where he had his surgery, which also oversees a pulmonary rehab program. His rehab is three days a week and, according to him, features screaming and berating exercise physiologists. He used another term....

You must understand, Don is a proper British gentlemen who never raises his voice and is very aware of all the manners of living in a polite society. When the woman was screaming in his ear and he quietly mentioned that his hearing was fine and she needn't scream, she told him that she would scream as much as she wanted to scream. It went downhill from there. If that happened in my program, I would not put up with it and would have walked out on day one. Tipping my hat to him, he has made a commitment to continue, though he said he will be wearing a set of earplugs.

I also thought it odd that the class was available as long as there was improvement. Once the patient is stable, they end the program. If those were the rules at my rehab, I would have been gone nine years ago. It has kept me alive. The RN there has discovered problems and sent me to my doctor before something worse developed. It has provided a tremendous amount of social and emotional support.

Why it is so odd for me to hear about all this is that the head of Don's program speaks at conferences and is revered by my university hospital. Their pulmonary program is a shadow of the program I went through initially and continue to enjoy.

For Don, I hope he continues as it will teach him the parameters of what he is able to safely do in a gym on his own (he has also joined the new gym at my university hospital just blocks away from his home), meet other people dealing with the same issues, have somewhere he has to be and help him continue to lose a bit more weight. He has returned to eating regular foods yet has maintained his thirty-pound weight loss. He looks twenty years younger and even has healthy pink cheeks!