People are remarkably tough.
Case in point. My father was once in a car wreck so nasty that the junkyard staff refused to believe the vehicle's driver had survived. He got the once-over at the hospital and they sent him home, where he proceeded to go about his normal business. He worked his usual hours and went for walks every evening, despite the fact that he felt terrible.
At his follow-up visit three days later, they discovered he had been doing all this with a collapsed lung.
This landed him in the hospital with a tube sticking out of his chest...a tube he pulled out a couple of hours later because he needed to use the restroom and didn't realize that he was supposed to ask the nurse for help (my mother, who is a nurse herself, was ready to strangle him for that little stunt).
Anyway, they reinserted the tube and he left it alone, but during the course of his hospitalization he got increasingly frustrated. He wanted to be up and about and felt like a wimp for staying bed-bound once his lung was re-inflated. I was the one who finally put his condition into perspective in a way he could accept.
"What caliber bullet would make a hole that size?" I asked, indicating the spot where the tube vanished into his chest.
"Oh, probably about a 9mm."
"Well if you got shot with a 9mm, would you think you were a wimp for resting afterwards?"
"I suppose not."
It's funny, but once he thought of the hole as a fresh injury rather than "just" a medical procedure, he was way more OK with letting himself rest.