cancer – day 168

I had a good yoga practice last night. Afterward, I was quiet and reached for my water and my sweatshirt behind me, and the woman next to me, Susan, was trying to remember if I was the breast cancer girl from the week before. We talked a little bit, and it turns out that last Friday (the morning after our last yoga practice) she had a lump examined, and it wasn’t good. She then had a mammogram on Monday, which also didn’t look good, and she just had her biopsy today, so she’s waiting now on the official pathology to tell her formally that it’s cancer. Ugh, unbelievable. And serendipitous that she was right next to me for yoga tonight so we could talk quietly for a few minutes afterward. She thought I was inspirational and I said a few things to her about just keep moving forward one thing at a time and it’s all going to happen really fast and I’ll be thinking lots of positive thoughts for her all week until I see her again.

Wow. Right there right next to me in yoga.

It’s getting on 6:30AM. I’ve been up since four o’clock, couldn’t sleep. It’s not uncommon for me, I just can’t stay asleep. Usually if I wake up at three or four there’s some hope I’ll be able to sleep again, but usually if I’m still lying awake at 5AM then I’ll get up. That’s how I was until the last week or so, but now if I’m wide awake at 4AM I don’t bother trying to sleep again, I go ahead and get up. Because when I’m wide awake, I’m seriously WIDE awake, no hope of sleep for hours. And for some reason if I’m up in the night here (in Sacramento), I can’t fall back asleep. Of course, it takes me two hours to fall asleep in the first place. So I go to bed early, ten, get to sleep by midnight, then I’m up sometime between four and six. I never sleep past six, though that’s in good part to the fact that through chemo my first meds of the day were at 6AM and so I’d have a quiet little single beep alarm wake me to take the pills and I’d go back to sleep until Mark had to get up at seven-thirty. But eventually that little beep alarm became enough to program my head into thinking I didn’t need to sleep past 6AM. During the first week of chemo, not such a problem, I slept a ton, my body was working so hard against the chemo.

So what do I do with the time in the wee hours of the morning? Pretty much the same stuff I do when I’m awake during the day. I try to read, though my comprehension is about a tenth of what it used to be. I write my journal and blog (that’s usually later in the day, though). I research a lot about things we can do to help with my side effects, or what other people have experienced in chemo/radiation/breast cancer treatment, and about the various meds they’ve given me and what radiation treatment will be like and what hormone treatements are available to me (only one) and why we have to do it and the side effects of that and other risks caused by it and radiation and chemo and, heck, just a lot of research on breast cancer in general. It’s amazing how I can feel like time is crawling by in treatment and yet a day fills with rest and that kind of keeping myself occupied day after day. I spend a good deal of time managing my meds, making sure I have everything and am taking it all on the right schedule along with the times I have to eat certain amounts. And everything I do just seems to take a lot of time because I’m so slow. I walk really slowly, both because I don’t have the energy to move quickly and to be sure I don’t trip on a rug or bang into the wall corners or smash my hands on things because of the neuropathy. Everything is in slow motion because of the fatigue.

Now there’s something that just continues to blow my mind. That the fatigue can keep getting worse. It really worries me for radiation, when fatigue is one of the primary complaints/side effects besides getting burned. I had no idea fatigue could be like this. Last night after yoga I went in the bedroom for something easily forgotten, I don’t know, to take off my shoes and put on my fuzzy night socks I think. Which you would expect to take a few seconds but takes me minutes because by the time I get there I don’t remember what I went in for. And I saw again that my headscarves on the bottom shelf of the wig cabinet were a mess and I really should fold them. So I sat on the floor for what should have been three minutes to fold these scarves but of course took me ten minutes to do, and then I was so tired, I could not for the life of me get up off the floor. Fatigue is a strange beast. I can’t count how many times I’ve given up on trying to get up off the floor from something and instead let myself nap there for ten or twenty minutes because I don’t even have enough energy to get off the floor.

Which is why it annoys me so much that Mark has issues with vacuuming, because this carpet is just plain nasty and here I am sleeping on it because I’m too fatigued to get up again when I sit on the floor for something. You’d think that would bother him as a caregiver. It’s happened sitting on the floor to change socks, that’s how bad the fatigue is. I end up lying on the floor, sometimes napping, but resting, because I’m too fatigued to get up from the floor after changing my socks. And that’s a normal state for me now. How am I going to deal with that getting worse during radiation?

Ach, see, now there’s one reason right there. Someone’s car alarm is going off. Repeatedly. How do people live and sleep in such noisy places? This isn’t even a bad part of town, I mean, this house (we’re still living in the “foreclosure” house . . . there’s started to be mail from the mortgage company probably threatening the owners with late notices and maybe the start of foreclosure warnings, but nothing has happened, we’ve had no notice of foreclosure or eviction, and we still pay rent, so the owner is happy, though that will change when we get foreclosure and eviction notice from their bank, because we certainly won’t pay the rent then, while we’re running around looking for an apartment hard-core) is in one of the nicest neighborhoods in East Sac, though it’s close to a fairly primary East Sac road (at 55th & H).

Man, I hope the carsickness doesn’t bother me tomorrow. Maybe I can sneak in a couple days of quiet at home in Volcanoville next week if the carsickness is finally getting better. But we’re going there tomorrow, Mark’s driving, just for the day to take some stuff home and bring back other stuff like Halloween costumes, then we have the wine club Saturday night, and a milonga. I am going to be so exhausted, why am I thinking that I can do all that in one day? The trip to Volcanoville will have to be short so I have time to rest when we get back in the afternoon, or I’ll never make it through two hours of SactoVino and then TBTR, though I really want to get to the milonga at least long enough to see Jorge Nel perform. I probably won’t get to do any dancing, suspecting how tired I’ll be after everything else. But hopefully we can at least go. Hopefully we make it all the way to Volcanoville without me getting too carsick first, that’s the only goal that really matters tomorrow.