Making sense of recovery info
51 yo F, was super active. Spontaneous pnuemo while flying didn’t resolve; had wedge resection/vats, mechanical pluero, and cryoablation. 4 weeks out now and everything went fine, but I am very confused about the nature of the pain and what I can do to make it long term better (or worse). My surgeon is a bit of a maverick I gather and says there’s no clinical data to support any post surgical restrictions. He says literally everything is fine - do pull ups, swing heavy kettle bells, stretch, fly. I have a high pain threshold and haven’t taken any meds since the hospital and it’s not like end of the world painful but it’s very unpleasant. And as someone on here summarized “new pain every day”. Burning, hypersensitive, drinking cold liquids sucks, numb, lots of shocks, feels tight and crampy. I def don’t want to feel like this forever if there’s anything I can do about that. Some days I think I should just lean in and ignore the pain and work out or go to yoga to keep things moving, other days I think I should just chill more. At three weeks out I did a couple pull ups and took a short flight and I’ve been walking quite a bit. Seems about the same level of unpleasant as sitting on the couch - which is to say… fairly unpleasant. but what I really care about is am I maybe making things worse or slowing down recovery by not being patient? Or conversely by being too sedentary? I can make zero sense of what makes things feel better and worse in the moment or the next day, and honestly I barely care about pain now if there’s something I can do to promote long term positive outcomes… but I see no consensus about what that might be, and my surgeons more extreme stance makes it hard for me to just blindly follow with what he says. Has anyone found any useful studies? Or have a team giving them good info they trust about what to do now to feel better long term?