cancer – day 203

I just got home from yoga. The pain was really bad today. I went out to a milonga for a couple hours last night. I think I only danced with four or five guys and sat out more than I danced, but still it takes such a physical toll on me I find it hard to believe myself. Just walking from my office to the bathroom hurts with the burning in my feet, and a couple of hours in three-inch heels and doing some tango, well, it gets to the point of being unbearable and I’m done for the night. Then I get to sit there and watch my friends dance and be jealous that other people can dance without being in stifling pain. Last night my hands got worse too, and the radiation burn was really getting to me, and by the time we got home it was so bad I couldn’t sleep most of the night. It’s getting to the point where I associate Cell Space with pain rather than tango and the serene unity you can have in tango. I don’t care what the doctors say about how it could be permanent, I can’t imagine this neuropathy lasting forever, it just has to clear up or I’m going to go crazy.

I spent most of the day on the LoveSac couch, hurting too much to do anything, resting and napping. Into the afternoon the burning was a little less, and the stabbing prickly thing had stopped in my hands, so I was determined to go to yoga and to ride my bike there. It was a beautiful day and since Mark’s car got stolen we’ve had just my car and he’s been skipping his yoga so I could drive to mine. So I wanted to ride my bike so he would take the car and go to his yoga. When he skips yoga he gets more crabby, so it’s easier all around to do what I can to get him to go.

I just realized . . . it was so bad today that I never even went in to see my cats. That’s messed up!

I switched to an earlier yoga class tonight. The later class is an introductory one, and last week was the last class of that, so this week I graduated myself to a real regular practice. The time went quickly. At the end, during savasana (“corpse pose” for final rest), Kim (my yoga instructor) read a few sentences from a book or a poem, I’m not sure which. But it really got to me, and is what got me to journal tonight. It was about the bud and how even things that don’t bloom in flower have a bud and do blossom, and it ended with something inspirational about how we as beings rebloom with self-assurance, or something like that. But it almost made me cry, because that’s what I feel like it’s going to take when cancer treatment is over. I’ll get to go back to my regular life, my work, teaching, the peace of my forest, but it will never be quite the same again, and I’ll actually be starting a new life, reblooming. I hope.