It’s a little after 6AM and I’ve been awake for a couple of hours and decided to get up and do something constructive. My mind has been going ten to the dozen with ideas for my blogs, how to deal with all the exciting things happening at work, cancer and music.
This could become a book, which may help if you or someone you know is dealing with cancer, or it may not. At the very least it will help me as a journal and that’s fine.
Today is about emotions, not just for myself but the people that surround me and about coping mechanisms
The irony is that of all the people I know with cancer, my condition and prognosis is probably among the best. I’m about 6 weeks away from getting my next PSA tests, but the last one was the first one that went down since my 8 week’s of radiation, which is great.
Meanwhile 2 good friends have recently had mastectomies, one last week, she is still in hospital, another is making regular trips to hospital as the cancer has metastized, a colleague who is helping me by talking to me about her situation, which is terminal and another good friend whose cancer has now gone to his brain and is possibly inoperable.. None of these are people I met through cancer, they are just close people in my life.
My boss asked me a week ago how I was doing. I told her I felt I was improving, especially my fatigue and sleep, but that was speaking too soon, because as soon as I had told her that, it went backwards again.
Here’s a classic scenario for me, almost every day. I go to work and try to pace myself, with a goal to walk for half an hour at lunchtime (sometimes I achieve that, maybe once a week, because I suffer death by meeting). I love my work and when I’m busy I don’t think about the cancer at all. The goal is to leave around 3:30 and perhaps catch up on a bit of work reading when I get home or just rest. I then mostly leave between 4 and 5, which is still much earlier than I used to. If I don’t pace myself I really suffer to the point where it is an effort to raise my weary legs to walk from the car to the house, or do much of anything, where previously I used to go home and get on the cross trainer or go for a walk and play guitar. If I make it much later, I have to really think about whether I should be driving, make sure I have a coffee, windows wide open and focus. Don’t worry, I had one tiny moment once and have been ultra cautious ever since. I will not drive if I am too fatigued.
I come home, have dinner and fall asleep about 7PM. Once a couple of weeks ago I fell asleep eating a piece of steak, fast asleep, although my wife maintains I was chewing in my sleep, I think that was a moment when I woke up. I feel ripped off because that is my time and my time with my wife. She tells me to go to bed, but I feel too annoyed about losing my evening, the part of my lifestyle that I work for. By the 3rd time i grudgingly go to bed somewhere between 8 and 9PM feeling really bad for leaving my wife on her own every night.
Despite falling asleep in the lounge, I then need something to help me get to sleep when I get to bed, with which I am gone within 15-30 minutes. During the week I will sleep around 10-11 hours and wake up just as tired as when I went to bed.
On other nights, mostly weekends, I will wake up at 2 or 3 and get up and read for an hour and go back to bed, but I will still usually get 8-10 hours sleep.A couple of years ago I was fine with 6 hours sleep.
The fatigue is hard to describe. It is both physical and mental. At night it is a feeling of being dead tired and I have no control over it. I sit down, we watch TV or read my Kindle and within minutes I’m in a deep sleep. But it’s also physical. I now know what bone weary means, because that’s what’s its like. My whole body is exhausted. Lifting a limb is hard work. I go to play guitar and pick it up, put it down, it’s too hard and LOVE my guitars.
I’ve been working on my attitude, but please don’t tell me to think positive, I think all cancer sufferers hate hearing that. It’s not helpful. I’ve been focusing, as in my previous blogs about things to look forward to. One of those was my new car. With the help from a malignant cancer clause in one of my insurance policies (which also continues to help with costs not covered by my heath insurance), I was able to by a C5 targa top Corvette. Something I wanted all my life, but never thought I would ever own. The closest I thought I would get was sitting in one with my daughter at Disney World in Orlando. It is interesting how many people buy themselves a new car when they have cancer.
Ironically I wrote that goal in my bucket list app in 2011, not for a moment thinking it would come true and the due date for the goal was about 80 days from when it happened. I am a strong believer in goal setting, although I don’t do enough of it. I am starting to again though:)
But goals and things I look forward to may be as simple as putting new strings on my granddaughter’s guitar and giving her lessons, or a weekend away with my wife and friends, as well as bigger things like doing a rubber ducky boat trip on a glacial lake on the Tasman Glacier, a trip to Samoa this winter, or writing a new song. I’ve had several experiences where things on my bucket list that were highly unlikely, like being able to go to my grandmother’s 90th birthday party on the other side of the planet in Amsterdam, came true serendipitously and I subsequently got to go and visit her several more times before she passed away at 98.
The car is certainly good medicine. I love being behind the wheel and I even enjoy the process of polishing it, while listening to a podcast on my phone. We haven’t been on a road-trip yet, but it is now second nature, more or less, driving a left hand drive car in a right hand drive country. I am now the guy that I used to give the thumbs up to in a gas station or other places, when people see my car.
I’m going to break this up and the next blog is going to be about a melt down I had a couple of weeks ago, which was both bad and good.
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