Tuesday 3rd March

Today is my busy day at Wits, so I haven’t had that much time to really think about things. This is not a bad thing, sometimes.

It struck me in between classes etc that the chemo taste hasn’t been so bad today. Yay! Maybe, just maybe it is on the way out now. I am not completely convinced, as it has abated and then returned before, but surely there must come a point when it just goes J

I sometimes say to the kids, imagine if we could see all the cell phone, tv, radio etc signals flying around the atmosphere. It would look like some kind of mad rainbow soup, I imagine. Well, imagine if I could somehow have seen the chemo drugs in my body and then be able to trace them as they slowly work themselves out.

Imagine.

Such things aren’t to be, though, except in our imaginations. Or in movies, I suppose. Then there are,of course, the long-term effects of the drugs. The doc wants me to go for a bone density scan to get a baseline measurement because they may detect some effects of the chemo in about two years.

Makes one think. Makes me also realise, again, just how harsh the drugs are.

Still, they are designed to do something and I’m sure they have done just that.

I think I’m starting to be less exhausted these days. At least, I hope so. I definitely don’t feel as well as I did a few weeks ago, before I seemed to slump again, but I also seem to be not quite so mind-numbingly exhausted. I was damn tired today, but that’s also to do with 6/7 hours of teaching and running around in between – followed by house plays at Parktown.

Tomorrow is not such a demanding day, teaching-wise, which is good. There are more house plays, though, so another long evening.

This Drama thing can be quite demanding!

I have observed when we go travelling that we will fill the space we seem to have in the car (and trailer). I remember Carl and I going on a camping trip in the Cortina – just the two of us; and we filled the entire boot and back seat. The girls and I camped at SA schools last year – just the 3 of us; and we managed to fit everything into the Golf.

I think life is kind of like that: in some ways we are able to fit in and cope with what we have to at a time. There is always so much going on around us, but it changes too, so we kind of adjust what we can get done and what we can cope with as things come and go.

Sometimes, though, there are moments when it all seems just too overwhelming. If I look back over the last 6 months, since the cancer was found, I can almost not imagine that that could all have happened to me, or that I actually coped so well. I almost want to go back and digest some of the things, or wish I had taken the time to do so as they happened, as hard as they were.

Then, again, I think that I did do that, in the way I could at the time. What else was there to do?

I am glad I am where I am now. It is still hard and this journey is not over. I have trodden it as best I can, though, under all the circumstances. And I will continue to do so.

There is only one way to keep going forward and that’s to set your sights and move on. Sometimes it is at a plod, sometimes at a run, but forward it is. That’s the only way.