As regular readers will know, I’m on a treatment plan for “insurance” chemotherapy that will go on until late October. It is manageable, but occasionally I feel too rough to do terribly much (and am blessed that my work is predominantly a few video calls per day, those are easy to manage compared to, say, the level of international travel I did pre-covid and yes, would have restarted this year were it not for that pesky diagnosis in early March. My admission today is that I feel frustrated.
I feel frustrated that I can’t plan ahead for travel and events for the next five months or so, particularly as with covid travel restrictions lifting I would have loved to do a lot of travel, from going home to Cayman often, to reconnecting with clients internationally, to attending conferences and also leading offsites etc, as well as perhaps a personal vacation or two beyond the UK.
What fascinates me, though, is that my rational mind is calm.
The rational part of me totally gets that this chemo treatment is an investment in my future physical well-being, and also my mental well-being in that I can feel I “did something” to further reduce my already low risk of recurrence. It all makes sense to say “six months of discomfort and plans being reduced in return for the opportunity for decades of healthful long life”.
Why, then, do I feel frustrated? Well, we are human beings, not human “doings”, so sometimes we simply feel what we feel, we can’t rationalise that. Perhaps it is because for 56+ years I’ve been hard-wired to plan ahead, as well as to have an expectation that I was blissfully ignorant of, that I actually could plan ahead as I was feeling in good health all the time and could expect to continue that way. As the picture above notes,
What will I do about it? I noted a while ago in a blog that my context around the Cancer journey has, since the first diagnosis, been GRATITUDE. I sense a shift in context around the chemo part of this. I’ll muse on that, but perhaps the context word will be ACCEPTANCE.
With a context word as an anchor, rather than look to think too much about being frustrated and what I can and can’t plan ahead for, I’ll simply anchor back to the word acceptance and then take it from there.
As I write this, I feel a little rough today, so have decided not to do what I had planned from yesterday, which was to go up to a street market this morning and enjoy some Sri Lankan vegan food (my stomach is not up for my usual street market favourites of bacon, egg and sausage rolls!). Instead, I just feel rough, so I’ll take it easy for a couple of hours then go for a walk and enjoy the sun and cool breeze on my face. That is what is possible for me today and I will first accept and then embrace that.