Just get up.

← back to blog potsrehabilitationchronic-illnessconstraint-based-thinking Just get up. Thursday, 2 April 2026 "Just get up." That's what the

← back to blog potsrehabilitationchronic-illnessconstraint-based-thinking Just get up. Thursday, 2 April 2026 "Just get up."

That's what the doctors kept saying. As though the problem was motivation. As though my legs had simply forgotten they had a job and needed a pep talk.

My heart rate hit 170 from standing. My vision went dark. My legs buckled. And the medical advice was: just get up.

I was 27. I'd been a combat medic. I'd spent nine years in the Israeli Red Cross running toward emergencies. I knew what a body in crisis looked like. I was looking at one every morning in the mirror.

Nobody taught me how to rehabilitate from POTS. Because nobody had a protocol. The condition was too rare, too poorly understood, too invisible. So I built my own.

I started on the floor. Not standing — that was months away. Lying down, moving my legs. Counting repetitions not in sets of ten but in sets of one. One movement. Rest. One more. Rest. That was a workout.

Then sitting. Just sitting. Upright, in a chair, for five minutes without my heart trying to escape my chest. That took weeks.

Then standing. Holding the wall. Thirty seconds. Then sixty. Then two minutes. Each time my body screaming that this was dangerous, that I should lie back down, that vertical was not safe.

I taught myself to walk again. Not in a rehab facility with therapists and parallel bars. In my apartment. Holding furniture. Falling. Getting back up. Falling again.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about rehabilitation from a condition the medical system barely understands: you become your own researcher, your own therapist, your own cheerleader, and your own worst critic. All at once. All from a position of profound exhaustion.

The doctors who said "just get up" weren't cruel. They were out of their depth. They had no framework for a young man whose autonomic nervous system had stopped regulating basic functions. So they defaulted to the only advice they had: try harder.

But trying harder d