She's Going the Distance (aka Endurance)

Endurance is not one of my strengths. I ran a half marathon once a couple decades ago and my approach to training and the run itself was to basically manage it in small, time bound chunks to just survive. It was a race sponsored by my employer at the time (Go PacifiCare) and felt like a good challenge for Chris and I. I trained entirely on a treadmill at the local 24 Hour Fitness following the Runner's World plan for first-time half marathoners. While doing training runs, I watched the treadmill clock and distance like my life depended on it with a constant inner commentary of "one mile down, 13 minutes, only 6 to go, oh let's play Madonna for this next mile...15 minutes of Madonna can get me through this..." etc.  I never got a runner's high. There was never a point where endorphins kicked in and I felt euphoric. It was miserable and I had to find mental ways to just get through it to finish the challenge (and to beat Chris, which I did, so yay.)  

Same thing is true at work - my "specialty" is building new things - new teams, new process, new philosophy, new tools.  Unintentionally, all of my jobs have involved building something from scratch or redesigning something. I do terribly with redundancy, cyclical work or assignments I have to do more than a couple times, or which last more than a few months. I need clear start and end dates on things, I don't want to deal with 18 versions, and I always need a vacation or break to be working toward so I can sustain momentum and energy knowing very specifically how far away I am from my next assignment or vacation.

Well, now that I've written that all out, maybe it's more sustaining the status quo, or redundancy that I don't like.  Give me a five hour hike and I am ALL IN. Give me that same five hour hike every week for a month - and nope! Even with ice cream - we used to do ice cream Sunday every Sunday of the summer, but after about three visits to the same ice cream shop I was just totally not interested...So let me pivot here mid-stream and say that maybe it's more about repetition, redundancy and sameness that drives me crazy!

The reason I opened with that is because I am REALLY STRUGGLING with feeling stuck in a never-ending week-long groundhog day cycle of chemotherapy.  I imagine everyone feels some sense of this with Covid. Keeping track of the day of the week is impossible. Some days it's 2:30 and I have no idea where the time has gone or if I've eaten lunch yet. I spend a lot of time going back to the homescreen on my phone to get the day, date and time because there is SO MUCH SAMENESS to every day. With 16 rounds of chemo added to that situation, running May to September, I am bored and fatigued and antsy to get this part of treatment done with and it is making me crazy.  I think Covid is exacerbating this too. Last time I had chemo in 2014 I had fun rituals - I got a massage w reflexology and a facial after every chemo cycle. My cycles were three weeks apart rather than weekly, so I always looked forward to eating yummy food the third week when I stopped feeling nauseous.  I could arrange for visits with my sisters and friends to break up the cycles.  My mom was over almost every day to help w the kids and clean, do laundry.  In the current state there is nothing - no cyclical "reward", no north star for when I am done, no fun rituals or traditions bc there is NOTHING TO DO while isolating. Plus there is a bit of dread that this is Phase 1 of 4 phases so it just feels never ending!

Anyway - it is making me crazy and cranky and I am chaneling my excess energy into a lot of research and thinking about virtual school this Fall and the working parent experience. My apologies to my school principal, head of our PTA, Goleta Superintendent, Public Health Officer for Santa Barbara and even Governor Newsom who are the recipients of my energy channeling currently.  Maybe it will turn into something and I will have a new North Star.  Or I'll find a new interest in a matter of weeks anyway.  It's anyone's guess in the no man's land of unending SAMENESS.

Gosh, thanks for hanging in there for a fairly meaningless rant I needed to get off my chest!

Things that are making me happy:

• The pile of cards I got from my friends at Sonos: One of my awesome coworkers coordinated a card drive at work and dropped off A LOT of cards for me to read throughout treatment. I open one  day, reach out to the person who wrote it and say hi, and it brings me great joy to have those connections!
• My new approach to being "active": I am a little embarrassed to admit that my default for being active was how much I worked out.  Which is generally barre or cardio yoga five days a week. After speaking with an expert in post partum breast cancer about inflammation and oxygenation and cell development, it sort of clicked for me that working out five days a week isn't actually being active. So I have added a goal of 50,000 steps a week as well. Which is about 6,000 steps on days when I do a class, and 10,000 steps when I don't, or 25 miles a week. It's my first week and so far I am succeeding in meeting my goals.
• Mindy Kaling: I'm listening to Why Not Me? while I walk and also binge watching The Mindy Project (which I have never seen before) and obsessed w all things Mindy.
• Summer fruit: The cherries and watermelon are killing it this summer!
• Floating on Karina's Pusheen inner tube in the pool: Although the summer has been disappointingly cool this summer, when it's warm I am digging floating in an inner tube in the pool and blasting summer on my Sonos Move!

Things I'm struggling with:

• My looks: On top of baldness that makes me look like the victim of a nuclear bomb, I have almost entirely lost the brows of my right eyebrow and it makes me irate.  I am grateful for cancer treatment and progress on cures, AND I wish someone could work on treatments that don't make the patient suffer the additional pain of looking like Mrs. Potato Head for many months!
• Groundhog day in perpetuity: Nothing to add here, just a big, dramatic sigh!
• Virtual School: I am so relieved we are not going back to school in person, and also super sad for my kids and the awesome teachers, and feel compelled to try to make the Fall AMAZING for them so I am investing way more time than is probably healthy developing ideas for additional learning, activities, curriculums to do with the kids.  

Things I'm pondering:

• Planning a trip for October between chemo and surgery: We're starting to think about a plan to do something in October after chemo but before surgery. The kids will be in virtual learning, I will have no active treatments happening, and as you know we are going stir crazy. We are thinking of exploring a bunch of parks - Bryce, Zion, Arches, Yellowstone, and either renting and RV or staying in Air BnBs for like a week at a time.  I hope we can make something happen.  My hesitancy is in dealing with the kids during long drives and then figuring out the food situation - with restaurants closed and stores often out of things still (at least in Goleta) I worry that it might be really hard to maintain normalcy on the road...But I want to try.  Let me know if you have any tips!
• Work: I miss work but the freedom of not having to sit in hours after hours of meetings is like a GIANT GIFT. I need to figure out when I go back to work how to not have that be my reality again and I feel like I have said this many times before - after both mat leaves, after my first cancer, but then I fall back into full days of meetings which make me feel frustrated and not accomplished.  This overlaps a bit with the working parent challenges...but I am putting a lot of thought into how we work and how to radically change it.

Inspiration:

That's all I've got (and I realize it's not much.)  Thanks for reading!