Carpe Diem

Carpe diem. Seize the day. This is one of the lessons I am learning. If you feel like eating, eat well. Store up the calories against days when food might not look so appealing. If you feel like walking, walk. It might be a couple of days before the body (and lungs!) get exercise again. If you want to sing out, sing out.

Nothing about the way I feel is entirely predictable. Some days I feel perfectly fine. Others I am lethargic. So far, I can’t detect a pattern, although those more knowledgeable about the chemo drugs and their actions might detect one or see that I am falling within expectations. I don’t know. I try to make sense of things, but usually I’m reduced to just going with the flow.

My body is experiencing so many new things: surgery, chemo, other drugs, cancer. It’s no wonder that a panoply of new sensations has emerged. There’s a whole range of confusing physical feelings – something that feels sort of like fatigue, but goes away with pain meds, trunk muscles that feel stiff and burny in a totally different way from when they are exercised, tingles all over the body. Often, I can’t even describe the sensations, let alone decipher whence they came. So, I’m learning to just roll with them. Weird things happen to me now. Let it go.

I described to a friend the feeling of having been for an energetic walk along the lakefront, and then returning home and suddenly feeling awful. Not tired. Not fatigued. Not in pain. Just awful, in some indescribable way. This friend has had his own experience treating cancer, and he shared a terrific metaphor. “Yeah,” he said, “you never really know how much energy you have until it's too late. It's sort of like driving a car with no gas gauge and a different engine in it every day. Hard to know when to fill up, but you feel dumb filling up after just a couple of minutes of driving.” He concluded, though, that it is “better to err on the side of doing things than not, IMHO, even if you bonk pretty hard now and then.” This is my philosophy exactly. How will I know I’m overdoing it unless I experiment with my limits?

Still, I try to learn from experience. Today, I did the same lakefront walk, but at a more leisurely pace. I'll leave you with the astounding view I experienced just before skedaddling for home.