Some of that may be that you're hyper vigilant about your breathing and I bet because your INR is a little low right now, you're even more focused on it.

But too, I think sometimes the pain is actually from the healing taking place, and your increase in activity. I had aches and sharp pains starting a month after diagnosis and it lasted on and off for a few months after diagnosis.

So I do think a lot of it is just part healing.

I agree that what you're describing sounds like a normal part of recovery. It's not that you're feeling the clot, though. Like rmb said, the pain can be part of the healing process. My clots were completely dissolved before I went home from the hospital because of thrombolysis, but the pain I had in recovery was very much like what you describe, generalized pain in lots of areas of my chest, with some parts having sharp pains, particularly on inhaling, although sometimes I got sharp pains also on exhaling, especially near the end of letting the air out.

Before I ever got PE, I had a doctor tell me once that in a strange way, pain is good when you're talking about severe injury, because it means that what hurts is still alive. That might feel kind of like small comfort when you're hurting, but thinking of that did help me as I experienced pain after PE, because I did have infarction as well in some of my lung, and I thought, well at least I'm feeling something. It does take a long time for the lungs to stop getting those pains, and I think for some of us they never completely go away, although they're much less frequent and intense than in the beginning. But you kind of figure out what's the new normal for you, and you learn not to have your mental emergency alarm sound every time you feel them.

Remember also, you said you've been feeling better in general, eating more like normal, etc. Even if you just meant that you're feeling better emotionally, that has probably meant that you've increased your activity somewhat, and you may be breathing a little more deeply, more normally, than you have since the PE. I think a lot of us here will say that the period of recovery from PE was tougher in many ways than the time leading up to diagnosis and in the treatment phase. We almost have to relearn how to breathe properly again, something which most likely we gave little thought to before, but that process of getting back to normal is like flexing muscles we have some time not using. It can cause some extra pain along the way. I kind of felt like the pain of recovery helped me to not take for granted the fact that I could still breathe.

If it's any consolation, what I was three months into recovery, I had this unrealistic idea that I should be totally back to normal, and I kind of got depressed that I wasn't. I had a really low period around that time, so without realizing it, you could be going through something similar emotionally. Recovery is so much slower than we want it to be, so really you just have to develop more patience with your body and have faith it is healing. I think there are certain parts of getting better that we almost don't notice getting better, and then it's like we wake up one day and think, hey I don't have this or that any more, and you don't really even remember exactly when it got better, it just did.

Even if your body still feels limited in what it can do, the best thing you can do for yourself is to stay busy and distracted mentally so that the anxiety doesn't take hold. The busier you are thinking about something else, the less chance there is for fear and worry to creep in.