Emily emailed me in response to yesterday’s blog post and reminded me of something that I had said to her last month. We had spoken a few weeks ago about how I was (at the time) actually enjoying the slow down in our lives. There had been a lot of noise and a great build-up of anticipation in our lives that was suddenly silenced when we got the news, and for a while it was really nice. Christine and I stopped and took a breath, we just sat together for a few days and began focusing back on what was important. It’s amazing how fast I lost sight of that and needed to be reminded that this diagnosis has brought the important things back into focus in our lives: our relationships with each other, and with our friends and family.

It’s a lesson that we will need to continue to learn. Old habits die hard and it will probably take this treatment course and the subsequent rest of our lives to learn to appreciate what we have and to not be impatient. It’s hard, the world moves pretty fast and when I wrote that yesterday I was feeling like it was passing by without us; I had forgotten to take a breath.

I’ll probably forget again soon.

Today was a good day. It was a beautiful sunny day and I took the dog for a walk. I was ambitious and set of for the long version of our walk but wound up turning back short of the halfway point when my legs started feeling the strain, so it wound up being about a mile and half walk rather than my intended 2 miles. Regardless of feeling my limitations it felt good to get out.

It’s been a week after my first dose of chemo and I’m dangerously close to maybe almost starting to feeling a tiny bit closer to normal again. I don’t expect to get to 100% by Wednesday when we go back in, but I should hopefully be at like 80%. And since I probably won’t feel like 100% until next spring or early summer, 80 is the new 100. And when this is over and I do get back to 100, I’ll have forgotten what it was like and I’ll pretty much be Superman.