The First Week Home From the Hospital
For the week after you come home from a hospital stay, when the instructions blur and the days get long. It pins down the medication times, the number to call, how far to walk, and what you are watching for.
Recovery · Body · Self-Care · Resilience · 9 items · once a day
The checklist
- Write the discharge instructions on one sheet by the bed — nobody remembers what was said on the way out.
- Set the medication times as alarms — recovery is the worst week to be remembering doses.
- Put the number for questions somewhere visible — a question at nine at night should not wait for Monday.
- Accept the first offer of help that arrives — people stop offering somewhere around day four.
- Walk whatever distance you were told and no further — extra on a good day costs you the next two.
- Write a line about how each day went — a flat Thursday makes sense beside a hard Tuesday.
- Keep the list of signs you were told to call about — a written list beats deciding while worried.
- Put one thing to look forward to in each day — a week of nothing but recovery gets very long.
- Book the follow-up appointment this week — it is easier to arrange now than when you feel better.
Use this checklist Free account: tick items off and keep each day's record.
How to use it
Run through it once a day, honestly and without scoring yourself. A checklist is a way of noticing, not a test: an item you cannot tick is information about the day, not a verdict on you. Over a few weeks the pattern of what gets ticked and what does not says more than any single pass.
With a free Theraglee account the checklist remembers each pass, so you can look back. Without one, you can still read it here and keep your own copy.