Medical Qigong

Some people believe that everything that happens to them is for a reason – like a lesson to be learned. I am not sure I buy into that, but the last couple of weeks have been a steep learning curve in how not to recover from cancer treatment.

When I returned from my holidays, I was full of pep and rearing to get back into life. I cleaned the house, organised my return to my temping job, got a freelance assignment and welcomed two homestay students – Freuke from Germany and Carrie from Taiwan. The girls clicked immediately and life was sweet.

The first shock was the temping job. I have forgotten (if I ever fully realised) how tiring it is to sit in one place for six hours making phone calls in the hope that someone will take pity on you and do the 25 minute health survey. It's boring the best of times, but when your body rebels against staying in one place, the minutes pass very slowly. It's lucky that the people around me are interesting and intelligent (students, mid-life sea changers, travelers), as are all the bosses, so time passes relatively smoothly.

The second shock was how that chemo-brain still lurks in the background and rears its ugly head at the most inopportune moments, like during a phone interview for the freelance story. Lucky I record everything. One moment I am talking to the guy, the next I realise that I haven't heard a word, or if I did, I can't remember what he said. Ahmmmm, where was I????

Then, I got the first bad cold I had in a year, which made me realise that the chemo must have been so powerful that it knocked out all the bad bugs from my body as well as the cancer cells. That really made me think. So, this is what being healthy is like? Welcome buggies. I am healthy. Come to Momma!

But seriously, I have been overdoing it for the past couple of weeks and the biggest lesson I must learn is how to slow down and walk before I can run. I have been so focused on trying to get back to 'normal' that I got too tired and hardly had the energy to contact friends whom I haven't seen since my return.

The Medical Qigong is great. It takes over an hour to do all the exercises and, after a couple of weeks, I am now hoping that, in the long term, it will help heal my feet, which are still suffering the after-effects of the chemo.

In the meantime, as if I have not enough to do, I am organising a group (on volunteer basis) to produce a booklet and DVD about Medical Qigong for the hospital to give free to cancer patients. I wish someone had done one already!

Yes, I am mad, you are right.

A new type of fatigue

Well, you won't be surprised to learn that, as usual, I have been over optimistic about the new turn of events in my life. It's Saturday morning and I am exhausted. I lasted exactly 5 hours at work yesterday, which is better than the previous 4, I grant you, but still, it's not the planned for 6, is it? And my throat is hurting from all that talking. Amazing, how hard it is to sit in one place and talk on the phone for hours on end. How do those people in call centres survive?

The weather has been very strange. It was scorching when I got back from the US, but now has settled in a cool-to-warm spring mode over the past two days. Not unpleasant, I must say, especially when the hot flushes hit.

Ah, that hot flush! The new kid on the block. I don't think I've talked about it yet.

It kind of snuck up on me slowly: first as a light, possible blush for no apparent reason, that eventually developed into full body heatwaves undulating from head to toe. My new mantra has become: is it hot in here, or is it me? Usually it's me.

Now, a while back I read about a Japanese study that found a correlation between having or not having hot flushes and breast cancer recurrence. Of course, at the time when I read this I haven't had any hot flushes yet, and I started to fret about what would happen to me and sighed with relief as the heatwaves arrived. Surely, the bigger, the better chance of having gotten rid of the monster!

In Washington, a few weeks ago, I visited my old doctor Dr. PP, the one who saved my sanity twenty years ago, the one who is not just a great diagnostician and human being, but also an oncologist and hematologist, and asked whether this study has been proven in clinical practice. His uncompromising reponse was: well, if it helps to believe, believe it.

What a downer! Ah well, I'll just have to look around for another reason not to chafe when the heatwave hits. Maybe I better go back to Alex the magician, who has kept my various hormone problems under wraps with his magical acupuncture needles for the past 7 years. Alex, here I come!

A new chapter

It's hard to believe that it's already October. Where did September go? That's what happens when you are feeling healthy, having fun and are surrounded by family and friends, whose love and laughter makes you forget the aches and pains of the past. Well, almost.

This week started with a holiday - Labour Day. That helped getting over the jetlag from coming back from the USA. Monday I met with a new customer for freelancing and got a good assignment. Tuesday I returned to the phone interviewing temping job I did before the big C hit. Everyone was wonderful, but I fell apart after 4 hours and had to go home. Yesterday, I cleaned the house and did some research for the freelance story and had supper with my friends Judy and John. By 10pm I was catatonic.

Not to worry. It seems to me that everything is going fine and in a few weeks everything should be back to normal – well, as normal as possible, given that I will be going to a lot of cancer related exercises and things.

In any case, assessing the situation, let me say that going on this 7 week holiday was the best thing I could have done to round off this year of horror that I just passed through. Apart from seeing Tunde and his new family and all my old friends from my youth, it provided a clear demarcation between my state of 'sickness' and 'health'. Coming back on the airplane, and this past Tuesday, I was extremely conscious that I was coming back to a new life, that all things of the past were well and truly gone (including family angst) and Tuesday would be the first day of the rest of my life. So, the future looks rosy and, even though I get easily tired, I feel that the best of things are still to come.

One sign for this optimism is that ordinary, everyday things are not such a drag. A few months ago I couldn't bear the thought of cleaning and paid heavy dollars for cleaners to come and do a half-assed job. Yesterday I whizzed through the house, vacuuming and washing floors, wondering why it was ever such a pain, and absolutely not wanting anyone else to do the job for me. Just as well, I suppose, since a year of unemployment made a big hole in the finance department, and you will all be happy to know that I am actually watching what I spend.

Besides focusing on the future and my ability to earn a living (not ready for retirement, sorry), the reality of the cancer is still very much around. My feet still hurt and it's difficult to wear closed shoes; on a cold day I can still feel my ribs; and on Monday I find out the results of the glucose tolerance test I went through yesterday.

That was a big shock when, just before my departure for Fort Lauderdale, I had the first ever borderline blood glucose level reading of my life. And, spending time with my brother, who has badly managed diabetes, was a sobering wake-up call. So, I changed the way I eat and exercised and dropped 7kgs of the 10kgs I put on during the last year. Maybe that's why I am feeling better. No matter, I bought a book about low GI eating and am in the process of making sure that I stay on the healthy side of gastrointestinal matters. It would be very nice to have a couple of years of good health!

So, the bottom line is that at the moment I am full of beans, looking forwarad to a healthy and productive future - enjoying family and friends and getting on with my writing life and continuing my various volunteer activities. I have gotten into a new habit of saying thanks for my newfound health. I have adapted the sheheheyanu prayer, which basically says: 'Blessed are you......for bringing me to this season,' to 'Blessed are you......for bringing me to this day.' It seems to make a big difference. However, I did notice, that I have lower tolerance for injustice and I cry very easily when I see other people in strife not of their making. I don't know what that is all about, but will surely find out one day.

So, things are looking good. It's Friday morning and I am hoping that I can work the full 6 hours shift today. Now that would be progress!