January 10, 2024

Today is the one-year anniversary of my last dose of chemo!

I wanted to keep going, but my body told me I’d had enough. I had gained about 30 pounds; most of the hair on my head and body was gone; my lungs were beginning to retain fluid; I couldn’t walk up a single flight of stairs without pausing; my fingernails were so brittle I couldn’t open the cat food cans; and I had swelled up from head to toe to the point I almost needed a shoehorn to put on my slippers.

The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak as they say. My doctor agreed without question that I couldn’t have managed another session without the side effects becoming dire.

I managed eight treatments over a six-month period, which he said was more than most, and made significant progress. My real trial, however, was about to begin.

You know how sometimes, when life is really making you struggle, you’re like, “Whatever I’m being prepared for, let’s just get on with it already.” Chemo and the recovery from it turned out to be it. Trust me, the recovery is just as hard if not harder than treatment. You have to push through it and work at making yourself better and stronger day by day. The option, of course, is simply to accept your frailer self and live within its limits.

You know which path I chose.

I went back to the gym and was elated a month later when I was able to jog a little bit on the track. It wasn’t really running, though, just a faster trudging for the land whale I felt I had become. I was equally thrilled the first time I made it up the steps in one go. The swelling abated, my lungs cleared, and my nails grew back. Curiously, my hair came back a bit thicker and just as blond as ever. I’m about to do my third self-inflicted haircut since with a kit I bought at CVS back then.

I also had our hyperactive garden to keep me active, which took over for the gym in the summer. With a lot of help from Beth and one of her friends, we got it planted and it did fairly well with my limited ability to tend it at first. By season’s end, I was able to close it out properly for the first time and create a two-step composting station. I expect a good start to this year’s microfarm.

I’m back in the gym three days a week, starting cautiously, yet leaving my muscles knowing I’ve worked out, and I am actually running. I focus on the motion: picking my feet and knees up, feeling the motion in my hips, and putting some spring into my calves. Each time, I string longer bits of running into walking around the track. By months end, I expect to be doing several laps at a time. And this year, I will continue gym workouts as well as working in the garden.

Today I feel better than I did when I first retired. At that point, the cancer was spreading into my spine and ribs. Now, it’s beat down and tamed further than we had first envisioned. I’ve already gotten down from land whale to something more like that grunting rhino at the back of the stampede in Jumanji. Hopefully, I’ll achieve something like retired race horse or at least quarter-horse by the end of the year. You know I’m not yet ready to be put out to pasture.