I kind of lost it with Kevin last night, weeping, feeling so frustrated by how out-of-shape I've gotten. I've actually lost about ten pounds since chemo started, which is kind of unnerving, since I've been eating a fair bit (I'm hungry all the time, it seems), and mostly bedridden, which makes me think that I've probably mostly lost muscle, which is sort of infuriating. Insult added to injury. I can *feel* how de-conditioned I am, and it's just dragging at my limbs.
And while I should be recovering from chemo within a day or two, enough to start exercising again, soon enough is surgery, and the limitations that will come with that for a few weeks. And then six weeks of radiation, and I don't know how tired that will make me. I bought a bicycle at the start of the summer, and I was so excited to use it, but between it being miserably hot in Chicago and me being sick, I've basically not gotten to ride it at all, and it makes me frustrated every time I see it in the garage.
And yet I know that I was in moderately good shape before the cancer diagnosis, and if I hadn't been, the last five months of treatment would have been so much worse. I can see it, in the other patients at the cancer hospital, in the startled way the doctors and nurses keep telling me how good I look. (Not today, but most days). And knowing that's going to motivate me to get back to fitness over the next several months, so I'm as ready as I can be to weather whatever storms are coming. (Even if that just means book deadlines that keep me up at night for a few days or weeks, or weekends of intense paper grading...)
So if you can, do something for your health this week. Eat some more veggies, get the workout clothes that the lack of has kept you from going to the gym, take an after-dinner walk, schedule that long-overdue doctor visit -- whatever. Keep your health a priority, okay? It's not easy, in this busy world of ours, but it's so, so important. Take care of yourselves, people.