Tag: feel

It’s today it’s today.

As my lymphedema gently nudged me awake from my slumber this morning, I suddenly realized that today is a huge mental load. Today is exactly two years from the day I bolted awake with a feeling of dread, a big lump on my neck and the unconfirmed knowledge that something was horribly wrong. Even though my diagnosis was not confirmed until about two months later, that is where my journey truly started. I should have realized it was coming. On the surface, I was suppressing the memory, but my body knew better. I haven’t felt like myself in days. I had some random panic attacks. My fibromyalgia was flaring like nobody’s business and I got my first migraine in a long time. Now it all makes sense. I was refusing to acknowledge my internal ptsd out loud, but my body was doing it for me.

It occurs to me, now, two years later, that I really need to change my strategy. I have made it my mission since cancer to just keep swimming and pushing and to let nothing hold me up or get in my way anymore. I am always in motion, even if I don’t feel well. I sometimes ignore the need to take a break, because I am afraid that it will slow me down enough that I will start to dwell even more on everything that has happened to me. I also spend too much time chastizing myself for my own thoughts because I assume that my trauma clearly wasn’t as severe as a lot of other people’s.

And where is that getting me? NOWHERE! That gets me panic attacks and prolonged fibromyalgia flares and even more missed time doing what I love. I’ve got it all wrong and I need to change my strategy from constant movement to actual acknowledgement. I need to process and acknowledge/accept? what has happened. Otherwise I cannot really move forward. I read a great article in GoodTherapy magazine from May of 2011 written by Susanne Dillman, PsyD. She said that true acknowledgement of trauma is absolutely necessary for healing to begin. She points out that there is no real hierarchy of pain. Trauma is not scalable. This is a belief that is more flawed than accurate. So, me trying to downplay my trauma and compare it to others is getting me nowhere and I need to stop. She says that trauma lies at the utmost extreme of human experience and there is nothing ordinary or expected about it form the individual’s perspective. You cannot compare the danger, horror and fear involved, regardless of the content. The experience is your own. Once something is extreme, trying to rank how extreme it is is useless.

She also points out that you are literally blocking your healing journey by not acknowledging your trauma because you are denying yourself any sense of self compassion. Healing is the only way to truly detoxify trauma. I don’t think she is talking about sitting back and completely wallowing for weeks at a time. She is just saying that you need to realize that it is real and allow yourself to feel in order to get truly past it.

Dr. Katz

It’s Time To Get Back to the Smoothie

I finally went on a vacation after almost two years. It was amazing. In the weeks preceding it, I became acutely aware of just how much I NEEDED it: emotionally and physically. I felt like every cell in my body was about to burst with the drive to get the hell out of town an away from everything: my environment, my routine, my town, everything. In between the vacation cravings came the vacation fears. What if something terrible happened to one of us? What if we didn’t get to go at all? What if we didn’t survive it? Let’s be honest for a moment. Each and every time we tried to have time off in the last two years, something awful happened. A pandemic started. Someone had a heart attack or, my favorite, someone got cancer. You see what I mean? The vacation fears almost took over the vacation cravings to the point that we felt jinxed just to utter the word vacation. We started saying pause or any other euphemism to avoid saying the word vacation. It’s ridiculous I know, but it’s what happened.

So, the big day finally arrived. We were all packed and ready to go, BEFORE 2 am the night before. This in and of itself is a miracle…lol We celebrated each mile stone with vigor. Hurray we made it to the airport. Hooray we made it through security. Hurray we made it on the plane. And then, the celebrations stopped because flights were delayed…and cancelled. But, we even made the best of that and just kept switching gears as fast as they changed.

Finally, we made it to our destination: sunny Key West Florida. I had never been. It was gorgeous and hot and sweaty. I was in love. I thought for sure that it would be smooth sailing from there. It was, sort of. I realized quickly that we both had forgotten how to really take a vacation. We were kind of anxious at first, waiting for the other shoe to drop and wondering how we would handle it so far from home. I think we each took our own day to fall apart a little and lift each other back up again. It sounds like a waste of time, but it wasn’t. We needed that time to absorb that it would be ok and that we would be ok and that we were allowed to just have fun and relax. We did get the hang of it eventually.

It ended up being a marvelous vacation, plane snafus at the end not withstanding. We did relax. We did have fun. We ate stuff. We did stuff. We saw old friends. We tried new things. But, after a week, it was time to get back to the real world. I realized the routine I had been so vigorously campaigning against before we left was not actually a bad thing. There is safety and comfort in the routine. For chrissakes, for the past two years life has been anything BUT routine until lately. If I am being honest, things were finally getting normal enough to even be able to notice a routine. I told myself that the routine was dragging me down, but it wasn’t really true. The routine just let’s me know that I am okay and that things are ok. That’s a good thing.

According to Diane Lang, 40 % of our lives involve routines. Routines give us a sense of structure. They give us a sense of accomplishment. They let us know that we are doing ok. They give us a pattern to follow. They are even important for our mental health. They allow us a sense of what we can control. I think this has been especially important during the pandemic. I know that for me, being able to establish a routine has been essential in my continued healthy survivorship after cancer. The bottom line is, routine are not so bad. On that note, now that I am home, I think it is time to get back to the smoothie. I missed it while I was on vacation.

Dr. Katz

I just don’t know how to feel.

So, as I understand it, the end is near for my cancer treatments. This week is supposed to be the week. The last chemo. Wow. Just to say it out loud is really something. It doesn’t even seem real. Could it really be true? Of course, when I speak in terms of the end, it is not really the end. The next five years of my life are pretty well mapped out with follow ups and scans and appointments. It is really at the end of those five years that it is really “over,” not just at the end of chemo. There will always be that little forever shadow monkey on my back that things could take a turn for the ridiculous again.

I would be lying if I said that I am not excited about the prospect of chemo being over. But, weirdly, at the same time, I am a bit terrified as well. No more chemo?! While that means, hopefully, no more of the awful side effects after they all wear off. It also means no more internal liquid defense system. It also means that there could be more opportunities for the cancer to creep back into my life. Hmm. How will I know if it is coming back? In the interest of respecting the post traumatic stress aspect of being a survivor, I made a promise to myself not to panic at every little twinge or symptom that I experience after treatment is over, but should I? Or should I be hypervigilant? I don’t really know the right answer.

I am looking forward to feeling like myself again, to having stamina, to being able to exercise, to being able to have hair again (hopefully completely different and thick and amazing), and to feel, dare it say it, sexy again. But, I hear that that is going to be an additional wait as well. I have been told that it can take up to six months before patients feel back to baseline. This kind of statistic just makes me anxious because I suspect that it will be a natural tendency for everyone, including myself, to expect me to pick up right where I left off before treatment as far as work and life in general. I have a gift for putting extra pressure on myself and I am sure this will be no different. Well, at least I am consistent in that regard…lol

Basically what I am saying is that I am kind of all over the place right now. I have no idea how to feel. Part of me is ready to throw caution to the wind and literally have a party( socially distant of course) to celebrate the end of this chapter. The other part of me realizes that there is a whole lot of other stuff to consider before the party can begin.

Dr. Katz