Monday again

It was a really hard day at work. Not just for me, for the entire PT staff and the front desk. I'm not sure why...maybe because one of us is out sick, or because of some kind of energetic thing in the air, the storms brewing that slammed into the afternoon, something. One patient after another came in to tell me about the major challenges they are facing in their lives: a breast cancer survivor whose husband has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer while her father is in the hospital for treatment for an acute infection and had become incoherent; a handsome young man in his prime who has survived a head on motorcycle crash and is relearning to walk while dealing with hardware holding his leg and back together; a woman in her 50s who has been suffering chronic pain since the birth of her daughter 21 years ago; another woman in her 40s who is recuperating from brain cancer and dealing with the ravages of treatment - as perspective on my own quality of life, I'm grateful for the stories I heard today. It makes for a very hard day, but I leave the office feeling grateful for my good health.

I know it sounds odd for me to say that, but I really do feel that way. So far anyway, I feel healthy. It was a rough weekend, but there have been years in the past where just the intense heat that we experienced this past week would knock me out. That would have been excuse enough for me to take the weekend off and lay in the cool bedroom watching TV. And it is a luxury to give in to extensive rest and hours of sleep; chemo gives me total permission for that. So comparatively I am well and this is a blip on my life experience. Every good day is a good day. Today was another good one, even if it was hard.

Okay, so I didn't feel so well this morning. It was brutally hot on my way in to work, and the air was not working in our office nor the treatment rooms early today. I was wondering if I was going to make it through the day during the morning, feeling vaguely nauseous, but by midday the air cooled and my energy improved. The queasiness that I feel so much of the time lately backed off and lunch revived me. Getting adequate nutrition and frequent enough food input if a chore these days, and some things are beginning to not taste as good...green tea for example, and spices have lost some of their potency. But a healthy meal feels good in the belly no matter what it tastes like. And once the icky post-chemo feeling diminishes, I begin to force feed myself the numerous capsules and pills that provide the supplementation I am prescribed by my doctor and that I desire based on my research and on the way I notice I feel after taking them. They make me feel better. And I feel pretty good.