It’s a time for a Pollyanna approach to life. Until there’s clear clinical evidence to the contrary, I’m going to assume the cancer has been knocked back and will continue to diminish with time. The alternative is to worry about every little symptom and side effect and generally live as a hypochondriac.
That’s not to say I don’t have moments where my head fills with every dark thought imaginable, only that I’m not going to focus on them and generally not blog about them. Suffice to say that chemotherapy, as unpleasant as it was, was something to focus on and provided the feeling that I was actively fighting cancer. When that ended, the dark thoughts came rushing back. This is actually pretty common for cancer patients at the end of treatment. Passively waiting for the next test result is a form of mental torture. It’s far better to feel like you’re actively doing something.
In the long term, returning to work and as much of a normal life as possible is my plan. I think it’s a far better vote of confidence for my prognosis than pursuing a bucket list. Bucket lists are not without their risks. I read a column by a woman who got a cancer diagnosis and was given 18 months to live. She proceeded to go on a quest to knock items off her bucket list and ran up significant credit card debt in the process. Five years later she’s still alive and dealing with the debt she ran up.
But I’m not ready to return to work yet. I haven’t demonstrated the ability to go an entire day without the need to lay down for a bit. I’m hoping to make a full recovery and not have to ask for an office with a bed in it. Until that time arrives, I need something else to focus on, to help rebuild my body after treatment, and to actively fight cancer. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know where this is headed.
The Midstate trail is a hiking trail in Massachusetts that goes all the way from the New Hampshire line to Rhode Island. I actually discovered it while exploring the Wapack trail in New Hampshire, which turns into the Midstate trail at the state line. It’s possible to walk across the entire state by simply following the trail of yellow triangles.
Several years ago, through the miracle of a GPS watch and Google Earth, I was able to explore bits of the trail as time allowed, import the track data from the watch into Google Earth, and gradually build a map of the trail I’ve covered, shown in red in the screen capture below. If I had a bucket list, completing this map of the Midstate trail would be on it.
Life events intervened after only exploring about half of the trail, and my exploratory perambulations in the woods started happening in Vermont instead of Massachusetts. Now life has intervened again. Vermont is still snow covered and muddy and a fair distance from Massachusetts. Running is too strenuous to do regularly right now, and walking isn’t quite strenuous enough. Hiking is a nice in between that hopefully will build my speed and stamina back to the point where I can run on the roads regularly, or better yet, do trail running again.
So I set off yesterday in search of a small stretch of trail in Westminster that I hadn’t yet explored. It was cold, cloudy, and windy. Jeans and a leather jacket might not be typical exercise attire, but it worked for me and my very casual pace. Besides, the lack of obvious running gear discourages getting over-enthusiastic and attempting to run any part of trail. I might point out the use of the word “discourages” instead of “prevents”.
Three lingering effects of chemo made this a bit of an adventure. For starters, I frequently feel cold unless I’m having a hot flash. I felt very bundled up for being active in the woods on a 40 degree day, and yet still felt cold for quite some time after starting out. Also, my eyes water and my nose (which I recently discovered doesn’t have any hair inside it anymore) drips in any air below room temperature. I was already a quarter mile from the car when I discovered a serious shortage of nasal tissue. Not off to the greatest start, and I seemed especially out of breath for my slow walk.
Then I realized that the trail was gradually going uphill, which partially explained the heavy breathing. There were houses visible on either side of the trail at the start, but after crossing a gravel road it quickly became all woods. Then the trail got steeper and went across the back edge of some open fields. Following the trail required going through a couple of fence gates with signs asking hikers to close the gate behind them. I’m pretty sure this meant I might come across domesticated animals of some form and was hoping they would be something friendlier than a bull.
Being on a hilltop near a field meant there were unexpectedly good views along the trail.
The further I got into the walk, the better I felt. This is exceptionally good news. For the last number of weeks I had been lamenting that exercise generally started off unpleasant, and quickly got more difficult. Usually the hardest part of exercise is getting myself out the door, and once the body gets warmed up the going gets a lot easier. That hasn’t been the case for the last couple of chemo cycles, but now in the past week it’s happened twice. It feels like progress!
Now for the tricky part: Deciding when to turn around and head back to the car. I had previously explored this part of the trail by parking slightly north of here and heading south, but turned around before reaching an obvious landmark like a road. I was now parked to the south of this section and heading north and waiting for the trail to look familiar. If I turn around too soon I’d leave part of the trail unexplored and unmapped. Turn around too late and my body might decide it’s had enough exercise before arriving back at the car. I felt good, so I pressed on.
The good news is that there was plenty of overlap with my previous exploration, and my body mostly held up though was feeling quite tired near the end. At one point I did stop and lean against a tree to catch my breath while heading downhill.
I’m really out of shape, even when compared to my post surgery, post radiation, just before chemo self. Today I’m feeling the effects of having done too much exercise yesterday, but those consequences aren’t nearly as severe as expected. The trend now is one of improvement, and exercise is starting to feel good again. The next milestone is to get back to where I was before chemo, and then continuing to recover from there.
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