Annoying Chores I Can Finally Do Again, Ranked

1. Sweeping the Floor.  Sweeping is just terrible.  Maybe it's because we have a pug and his hair ends up all over the floor the second he walks past the area I just swept.  Maybe it's due to the fact that one of my chores growing up as a kid was to sweep the house, and the pile would always have  a ton of food bits that my little brothers probably dropped caused me to harbor a life-long loathing for it.  I don't know.  What I do know is that sweeping while dragging 25 feet of oxygen tubing around was a big NO.  The first time I even tried, my cord went through the pile or I couldn't get the pile into the dustpan without the cord becoming a hassle-- something like that.  Whatever-- that was it for me and sweeping for over a year.

2.  Hauling Garbage to the Side of the Road.  Only not the worst because I don't have to do it multiple times a week, this landed on the "can't do" pile immediately after returned home from the hospital on oxygen over two years ago.  And unlike a lot of the other chores, it stayed on that list for a while post-transplant, since I had a lot of upper body healing to do.  I still have a 25 lb. weight limit, but I was glad when I was up to dragging them out there and taking the job off my wife's hands.

3.  Laundry.  Folding clothes has never posed so much of a problem that I didn't do it while on the waiting list.  And when folding clothes, I can watch TV or whatever and be thoroughly distracted, so as chores go, it's not bad at all.  Plus, the walking around the house to put the piles away was good for me.  As long as my wife had the clothes upstairs, I could take it from there.  I did, if necessary, go down when a basket of laundry that was clean and needed to be retrieved, but now, I can do it all-- put the load of laundry in, toss it into the dryer, and have it back in our drawers before my wife gets home.  Sometimes multiple loads in the same day!  I have just recently ceased to feel pain when I stretch to reach into the bottom of the washer, so now, the only thing that keeps me from being gung ho about doing laundry is that doing laundry sucks.

4.  Changing the sheets.  My wife loves her some fresh bed sheets.  If she had her way, I would put freshly washed and dried sheets on the bed every day.  And I do change them quite often... now.  Before the transplant, this was a no-go, in part because my cord became a hassle while putting on the fitted sheet, and in larger part because lifting the bed to tuck the sheets under it was exhausting.  Once I healed up enough after the surgery, cozy fresh bedding on three or four times a week became the norm.

5.  Hauling in the groceries.  One of the long standing aspects of the division of work between my wife and I has been groceries: she buys them, because she takes such pleasure in coupon cutting and deal hunting, so my job was to haul it all in from the car and into the kitchen.  But then I went on oxygen it was too tiring to do so, regardless of whether I dragged my long cord from my in-home concentrator outside with me, or put the portable concentrator on my back.  But hey, at least I still helped take some of the food out of the bags and put it in the proper spot in the pantry!

6.  Mowing the lawn.  JK LOL.  I still can't mow the lawn!  My doctor said that so much mold and organic heebie-jeebies are kicked up by the mower that it is just better if I don't do it, even with a mask.  Is this a permanent thing?  I didn't ask, but as someone who never quite understood the "I take pride in my lawn" perspective, I'm not in a hurry to get back behind the mower.  I do, however, know that I could do it, because I wore a mask and did it without asking my doctor first, not realizing it might be on the "don't do it" list.

*Bonus  Putting on clothes.  While it fits the basic definition of "chore," only the most ardent nudist would claim that putting on clothing is annoying.  The primary reason why I was annoyed by it is that for 17 months, it required me to take off my nasal cannula and breathe only room air while I put on a shirt.  The secondary one was that the actual process of putting on clothes requires much more physical exertion than one might assume.  Although pulmonary rehab classes offered tips on how to maximize efficiency of movement when getting dressed, it would still take a bit out of me, especially during the cooler months when putting on two shirts was necessary.  This is one example of an everyday activity that I completely took for granted until I needed a transplant.