Well, making progress on the house anyway. The floors are sanded and buffed, coats of sealant are on as well. Brian and Dominic have been pretty much working around the clock to make the most of the rental equiptment. They worked a 10 hour day on Monday, and had been going at it since 6am Tues (well, 6am surf session 8am work) with only a 15 min break for lunch. Today they dropped me off and are headed for an am surf session before re-buffing the floors and coating them with finish. Someone needs to hire these hard workers! After the finish dries tomorrow they'll work on the ceiling, then paint the interior, then the furniture can be moved in and the unpacking can finally commence.
As for me I don't know if there is progress on my "house". Today is my 4th cycle, I'm sitting in the infusion room waiting to get started. I'm relieved to be getting my "juice". Being off of the drugs feels a little like floating in the big blue ocean without a life raft with a swarm of sharks underneath you. For a while there I think I was just tiring myself out treading water waiting for a rescue, or waiting for a shark to snap me out of the water Discovery Channel style. This kind of seriousness of illness can shock you into a state of numbness - not knowing which way to turn or what to do. You have to trust in your care givers, trust in the medicine, trust that if you are meant to live a magical hand will sweep down from the heavens and pluck you out of the water. What I am realizing is even though we are all living on hope and prayers that the treatments will be strong enough to overcome the cancer, miracles can happen easier with hard work. I can sit an let the treatments happen to me and let people take care of me, or I can pick a direction and start to swim as well...there's gotta be land somewhere right? If the sharks want to eat me there is nothing I can do about that. I've been starting to moxa (heat therapy) every morning, and tomorrow I'll be doing daily Qi Gong again. I'm sleeping better, eating right, and making plans for the future. Sounds easy, but it feels like hard work. This holds true for all of us cancer or no cancer - exercise, eat right, rest, and give back to your body. We get all caught up in life trying to "succeed" at something. We deprive ourselves of sleep, we stress ourselves out with what other people think, we self-medicate with substances to quiet the noise of life on that road to success. Meanwhile, success is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that you never quite reach as long as you continue to try and seek it out. Why not just kick back and take in the beauty of the rainbow?
The pre-meds must have kicked in by now since I'm talking in analogies - rainbows and houses and sharks, oh my. Oh Denise and her analogies, right Dina? It all goes back to the rock theory. If you don't know about the rock then ask me the next time you see me...or ask Dina, she's had to listen to my crazy analogies for 15 years now.
Love,
Denise
