Distractions

I realize I haven't been blogging much for the past month or so. We went away for a weekend, we are on our second set of houseguests. This one came with a dog who freaked out one of our cats (who should have stood his ground and growled at the dog and he would have hid because he is really scared of cats).

I have also been dealing with lots of fatigue. What is fatigue? When you need 12 hours of sleep each day and then make it through. I also keep getting myself in places where all of a sudden I am so tired I can't function.

An example is this past Thursday. I got up and went to the grocery store and library in the morning. I didn't carry in all the groceries - only the perishables. I relaxed for a couple of hours and went to my knitting group. On the way home I stopped at a garden center for more vegetable plants. All of a sudden I was so exhausted it was almost too much to walk to my car and drive home. Then I had to lie down for about two hours just to recover to make dinner.

There is one thing of needing sleep. There is another that is too tired to function and not needing sleep. Just needing down time. Thursday afternoon I couldn't have slept but I just needed to be off my feet, watching bad tv in bed. (What is bad tv? TV which provides no redeeming qualities and is barely entertaining.)

I have had almost two weeks without doctor appointments - I haven't had one since the 10th. But this coming week I have the dentist, rheumatologist and someone else who I can't remember. And I need to get my bloodwork done on Tuesday.

I do not have that busy a schedule and sometimes even get together with friends. I spend a lot of time at home weaving on my loom and knitting. I also get to the library regularly....

Just a lot of distractions in my life. The benefit is the distract me from the state of my health. I am and will always be the most unhealthy person in my family. I have more health problems than my parents and they are in their 80s. My siblings are disgustingly healthy as well. My husband is definitely healthier than me too.

But all these distractions do lead to a basically happy life these days. I think that is the most important thing.

I Keep Forgetting To Blog

I mean to. It really helps me cope with life. I will say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.... so maybe I am on the way to hell in a handbasket.

But anyway, there is a lot going on in my life right now but I am not ready to talk about it yet. I will, when I am ready. Its not my story to tell either. I will eventually get to it.

My biggest distraction in life right now is that it is gardening season. My abilities to garden are very limited but its one of the things that I really enjoy. I can't did things up, move anything heavy or even garden for very long.

This year, my husband built me a massive raised bed garden with a five foot fence to keep out the predators - deer, fox, bobcats, skunks, etc. The cats are better at small predators than large ones. Last year, he also built me a huge flower garden.

I really enjoy gardening, but I said that already. I have been having fun with my vegetable garden and my flower garden. I have lots of little baby vegetable plants so far. I failed at starting vegetables from seeds. I mean I did start them, managed to kill half of them, forgot to label some and I can't tell sunflowers from cucumbers and zucchini to date.

This is my favorite time of year and I am very happy to be distracted by gardening. I would much rather stress about gardening than my health or any medical issue.

In the meantime, I will try to remember to blog.... but I am heading for the garden in a few minutes.... because its another day.

Music and cancer

Music to soothe the anxiety and pain levels of cancer patients sounds like a nice idea except I won't be singing anytime soon. You don't want me to sing. Trust me. I only sing in the car when no one is there and I can play the music loud enough to drown out the sound of my voice. It would be painful for anything else. You also don't want me to try to remember who wrote or sings a specific song - I am always wrong. I do know Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner but anything else, I am probably wrong.

All these medical researchers are scratching their heads about why music could help cancer patients with pain and moods. I didn't go to medical school, have no advanced degrees, and can't sing at all but I think I know why - its simply a distraction from sitting there thinking about pain and cancer. If you listen to music, you can let your mind wander and (silently - if its me) sing along, and distract yourself from the reality of your life.

When I was in treatment the new oncology center had a big waiting room full of cancer people and their friends and family waiting for the blood counts to be checked so they could get an infusion. Very little eye contact - too many bald heads, bad wigs, and obvious scarves (do I look as sick as everyone else?), lots of reading bad magazines, whispered conversations, and longing looks at the door to the nurses stations and at the ladies with the snack cart. It was not a cheery atmosphere to say the least. There was no background noise, just the perky receptionists greeting people, and the nurses calling names for the next patients.

I got a big surprise after treatment, they installed a big screen TV and rearranged the chairs and now everyone watches TV and talks to each other, in a slightly cheerier fashion. It is a distraction from reality. The Ellen Show is a good choice and popular among the patients. CNN and Fox News were definite no-nos. Who wants to look at the real world when we need a distraction?

Music makes perfect sense to me. I finally reached the 1990's and got an MP3 player - my last personal music system was a Sony Walkman with a cassette tape in 1978 - and I find it gets me through my work outs and other times when a distraction is required.

Cancer swallows you whole and any kind of distraction can be welcome. Something to think about besides surgery, treatment, pain, medical adventures, stress, and chemotherapy - I am all for it.

There is a hurricane coming

It is so exciting! It will be a big rainy, stormy day and then we can all compare beach erosion. Unless you live on the beach in which case, you need to move out for a few days. Or your boat is in the water and is in an unprotected area and yo need to move it out of the way. (If you aren't sure, ask people who have had to helicopter their boats out of the marshes back to the harbors after the storm surge.)

We are watching continually updated storm projections including the famous 'spaghetti' plot (I'm not kidding - that's the technical term) where all the computer models of the storm track are put on top of each other - and it looks like a really bad road map or a storm track.

I am no expert but have seen a few hurricanes in my life. There was one when I was a child and my father took us up to watch the wind and the waves roll in through the Harbor. My sister and I spent the time holding our arms out while dressed in our big yellow rain coats to see how far down wind we would be blown each time we jumped up in the air. (I don't think we moved that much but it was better than looking at the harbor.)

I was in Eleuthera in the Outer Bahamas at a Club Med when Gloria breezed on by. In true Club Med fashion, they told us if the hurricane hit to please pay attention to what they say, we would find a mask and snorkel under our beds, and if you wanted to be moved to a room on higher ground, please let them know. I had a room with a lovely ocean view. I took a nap that afternoon and when I woke up the ocean was much nearer than it was in the past. I was told I had to move my room. We then spent our proposed hurricane evening in the bar. Gloria missed us but managed to shut down the entire Eastern Seaboard. Our only request was to be able to stay for another week while they cleaned up the mainland. That Club Med is no longer - as it has been wiped out by other storms and is no longer any resort. It was a beautiful place.

Around 1990, Hurricane Bob blew on through Boston. I worked for a small business and she made us come to work that day because she assumed we could work through a little storm. When all the other buildings in downtown Boston started taping their windows she told us to tape the windows and leave. We spent the afternoon and evening hanging out with my roommate's friends at our apartment in the big complex I lived in. We picked the wrong apartment - we were in the half of the complex that lost power overnight. All his friend's went back to their units and they had power - even though they lived a mere 100' away.

There have been a few others here and there. To be honest, they all start to run together. We get hurricanes which make the national maps and news. We also get northeasters (not nor'easters - my parents who grew up here call them northeasters, all these transplants from other parts of the country think they are cool and call them nor'easters). Those can be just as bad as hurricanes, they form offshore and grind up the coast for a few days. The winds are often hurricane force. They occur year round. They result in a several days of bad weather regardless of the time of year. Hurricanes usually come and go in a day. We also get plain run of the mill blizzards - my husband and I have a running joke of what's the difference, when driving in it, between a blizzard and blizzard like conditions. They can also last for a few days.

All this weather is just a distraction from my health. I survived one oncologist on Monday and the dermatologist yesterday. Next week I have my other oncologist and the dentist (spending this week flossing like mad). I am waiting for the back pain doctor to call back about next steps. But in the meantime, I can tune into hurricane models being updated every two hours