I've been waiting so long to get back to work, that I am surprised by how tired it makes me feel. For the first week, everyone asks me if I am okay every day. I appreciate the concern. People have been genuinely worried about me, and I can tell that I have been missed. I can tell by the huge list of things that I have to do! I soldier on, and crash when I get home. Barely managing to cook and clean up after dinner, before I crash for the evening. Most evenings there is no shower; it just will have to wait till morning. I feel pretty accomplished, and quite proud of myself that I'm able to go back to a fairly regular routine, but I'm tired, and it's much harder than I feel like it should be.
I'm still at Keith's house. I think that I have unspokenly moved in. I have hijacked three of the under the bed drawers, and have shoes lined up against the far wall. Even before I lived here full time, I was staying over most nights, anyway, so it's not really a big stretch. I just have more stuff that is floating around now. It wasn't a spoken agreement, but he seems to be okay with my worming my way in, and I see him using my brush in the morning.
Like I said before, I try to keep with my regular routine, which honestly is a lot. I wake up at 6:00am, and give myself about 30 minutes to wake up. I'm addicted to Red Bull, and drink a sugar free red bull instead of a coffee. Looking at the nutritional information, I note that it has 100% of my daily B-12. Being anemic, and constantly fatigued, I'm thinking that this can only be a good thing. At this point, I dig out my exercise shoes, and put my clothes and makeup in a bag. I drive to my house - my sisters house - I don't really know what to call it anymore so Keith and I refer to it as "the Fawnskin property" in haughty British accents. This drive takes me approximately 15 minutes. I then walk the dog at least a mile, sometimes a mile and a half, depending on how much he is dilly dallying. Buddy is a terrier. Buddy is a terror. Buddy is a terror-erier. I give him his 25-30 minute walk, and as soon as I unhook the leash, he heads upstairs and jumps into bed with my sister. Dick.
Me, I jump in the shower, get dressed, minimal makeup, make myself a bagel, and head out the door. I'm usually to work between 8am -815am. Put in a full day at work, and I'm out again around 5pm. Home, some sort of extra exercise, hike, walk around the block, short bike ride and then I make dinner. Clean up after dinner. Take my pills. Fight the nausea. Pass the fuck out. Lather, rinse, repeat. As the week wears on it gets harder and harder to get up in the mornings, and I push snooze until 6:10...6:20...by Friday it's 6:30 before I manage to drag my ass out of bed, and by 9pm I'm falling asleep sitting up.
It's really, really hard. I feel like people should be cutting me a little more slack. (Really, maybe I should be the one cutting myself some slack, but I'm not really good at that.) Working 40+ hour weeks is absolutely exhausting, but I don't know if it should be. I don't know what I should feel like. I've been scouring the internet for information about gleevec. I'm trying to figure out if I'm tired because of the cancer, or tired from the medication that treats the cancer. Should I even be feeling tired if my counts are basically back to normal? What is normal?
Aside from that I have new side effects. I don't know if they are from the cancer or from the gleevec, but I feel like I have chemo-brain. Some day's I'm a whirlwind and I get so much done...and then the next day I can't concentrate on anything. I can't find the words I'm looking for when I speak, and I stutter over what I'm trying to say. It's embarrassing and terrifying all at the same time
I'm also having bone pain. Not a constant stabbing pain, but a sharp stab, and then a constant ache that lingers anywhere from 10-30 minutes at a time. I'm getting it in my large bones. My upper arm. My knees. Both my upper and lower legs. It makes me worried about the integrity of my bones. Before I was diagnosed I was having a pain in my left hip. I attributed it to sitting on a balance ball, instead of in a chair at work. Or wearing heels. Or sleeping wrong. But looking back, I'm thinking that it was the cancer. I should have paid better attention.
I'm also gaining weight. A good amount of it is water, but some of it is not, and this is making me very unhappy.
All I know is that some days,I feel sure that the cancer is winning. I feel sure that my whites are back up, and that my red blood cells are down. I feel constant paranoia that I'm falling apart below the surface, and no one is noticing.
I don't trust myself any more to know if I am okay or not. When I went to the doctor with an enlarged spleen and a white blood cell count of 516000, I didn't know that I was sick. Just a little tired. So given that I was so ill that I needed to be hospitalized and I didn't even know it, I feel like I can't trust my own instincts anymore. I feel like I need the doctor to tell me how I'm doing to know how I should feel. He says I'm nearly back to normal. All I know is that I don't feel normal. I feel tired. And fat. And achy. And scared.
I'm pretty damn scared that this is my new "normal".
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