cancer – day 362

Oy vey, the slow confused brain makes my work require so much more focus! And I’m still not as efficient as I used to be, I think. And wow, am I wiped out come six or seven o’clock.

I went to a swing event last weekend, but I actually left a night earlier than I had planned, because my feet burned so bad I couldn’t walk and was having serious trouble keeping tears from streaming down my face when the stabby slicing pain got really bad. I danced maybe ten songs in two days. Which is probably 200 dances less than I would normally do at one of these west coast swing events. Sigh.

But now that I’ve been home a few days and off of my feet, they aren’t as bad as when I was at the swing event, nor as bad as last Wednesday suffering through the rest of the Summit and traveling home. Wow, that seems like a long time ago. When I’m on my feet for even a little while, the burning is so much worse. Same thing with my hands, the more I use them the more they hurt. Sometimes in the evenings I just sit on the couch with my feet up without any socks or anything touching the bottom of my feet, with my palms turned up in my lap, and I literally don’t touch ANYTHING because I just can’t take another ounce of it. But, yeah, if I sit all day long with my feet up and never walk anywhere and never dance and never exercise, yeah, you could say the neuropathy in my feet is getting better. My hands, well, I use them constantly typing and mousing and holding the phone and all that, so there’s really no way to give them enough rest to not burn so bad.

The other thing that was a problem trying to dance swing was that the muscles on my right side are apparently still recovering from getting cut into in the surgery last year, because when I had a leader who overled with too much force, those muscles would just cry. All in all dancing has become a pretty miserable experience.

I don’t regret going to the swing event though, or spending the money on the ticket or hotel. It’s been a year since I went to a swing event, actually this event last year was the last thing I went to before surgery and treatment. So it was good to see people again, even though at least half of the people didn’t recognize me. That was a little weird. But I had a good time hanging out with some old friends, and we sat and talked a lot more than I would have in the past because usually I’d be dancing most of the time.

There’s another swing event in a month or so, and I’m going again. And hopefully I’ll dance a little more. Maybe I could have pushed myself a little harder to tolerate the burning, maybe in another month I’ll have more fortitude and get to have more dances. I just have to keep trying . . . it’s just not in me to give up something I love so easily.