THE PRESSURE SORE REALITY CHECK

Here’s the slap-in-the-face truth I wish somebody had given me when I first developed pressure sores.

Once you’ve had a serious pressure sore, you cannot simply heal it and go back to living exactly as you did before.

A pressure sore is an ulcer.

It isn’t a cut that closes, the stitches come out and everything underneath magically goes back to factory settings.

Think about it more like managing a long-term condition like diabetes - management has to become part of your life.

Ask the pressure-sore “old-timers”… most will have a story about the first time it happened.

I certainly do.

My brain simply didn't want to accept how serious the problem was.

I wanted the wound treated, healed and then I wanted my old life back.

I looked for shortcuts. Faster answers. Something that would get me out of bed and back to normal.

Eventually I had to accept something I really didn't want to hear:

THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS.

The turning point for me was when I stopped thinking of myself as somebody whose wound-care team was going to “fix” me and started thinking of myself as an active member of that team.

• That means educating yourself.

• Understanding pressure and shear.

• Understanding why your skin broke down in the first place.

• Taking pressure relief seriously.

• Looking after your nutrition and giving your body what it needs to repair and maintain tissue.

• Making the difficult decisions when protecting your body conflicts with what you'd rather be doing.

• And when the wound finally closes, not assuming the job is finished.

That is really what “Pressure Sore Recovery: What Nobody Told Me” is about.

Not just trying to heal a hole.

It's about learning how to heal, recover, rebuild and then protect those vulnerable pressure sites so you have the best possible chance of getting back to living your life… and staying there.

You can ignore the reality.

You can hope it never happens again.

Or you can learn everything you possibly can and become an active participant in what happens next.

TAKE RESPONSIBILITY...

GET IN THE DRIVING SEAT...

MAKE SHIT HAPPEN!