(Not So) Easy Like Sunday Morning

Treatment Progress Check: As I write this I’m on Day 11 of a 21-day cycle. Currently I have completed 1 out of 5 cycles. Last week I wrote that I knew things got easier from the treatment onward, but my body’s been a bit slower to recover this time. For instance, in the first cycle, the cold sensitivity mostly went away after a week. Yesterday, 10 days in, handling eggs when making breakfast still feels like I’m holding ice cubes. Still, I’m getting through the days.

My keywords this past week have been “slow down”.

This is a weird thing for me, because I’ve never considered myself a particularly “fast” or “industrious” person. But in big ways and small I’ve been noticing the way I push myself to do as much as before, or at least as much as I possibly can in that moment, before feeling like I’m ‘allowed’ to take a break and rest. I want to walk as fast as I normally walk, but my feet are getting much more tender, and my body is working through some pretty serious medication, so I have to remind myself that I can’t. Yeah, sure, I want to rest, but first there’s just this quick thing to do in the house, and that thing, and oh Lori would appreciate it if I just did that thing, and so on. I want to spend as much time in the office as I normally did, but is there really any point to sitting at my desk with my head in my hands, unable to work up the resolve to start a task?

And like I said, it’s surprising to see myself in this light! I look at people in my life that seem to be constantly in motion and unable to just sit and be, and I tell myself “hah, couldn’t be me!” But it turns out it’s more complicated than that, and there are ways I push myself that I hardly register.

So this past weekend, while Lori was away at her work and it was just me and the kiddos, I said to myself: you are going to move at a slower pace. Physically and mentally, slow down. Set your expectations of yourself low, and be happy if you hit them, but fine if you don’t. Now I’m about to brag that I accomplished a “surprising amount regardless!” but now that I write it out it seems like I’m still not quite taking the right lesson away from my experiment.

As with many things I’ve written about in this blog, it’s something I get to keep in mind and keep working on.

On a much less serious note, I recently had to change the notification sound on the medication reminder app I’m using. The problem was that, twice a day, the default sound was a little flute melody that happened to sound just like the opening notes of Welcome to the Black Parade by the band My Chemical Romance. After a week or so, my family was becoming very tired of me singing 🎵When I was / a YOUNG boy / my FAther 🎶 at breakfast and dinner.

_{(Drop a note in the comments if you felt compelled to go listen to the song again after reading this)}