G is for good intentions

I woke up crying today, just felt hot tears rolling down my temples, under my ear lobes into my neck. Don't really know why, but then I felt sad almost because I thought ought to. I think I am sick and tired of feeling, well.... sick and tired. I have a vague feeling of nausea quite a lot of the time, I've now identified that if I start feeling queasy, it means I am actually hungry and need to eat something. If I miss that window of opportunity, then I really do feel like I'm going to vomit and the remedy for that is food, but I don't feel I can stomach anything once I have reached that stage. What a drama. I'm not feeling as tired as I was before my transfusion, but I still don't have a normal level of energy and I find that annoying. After a few quite active days, while mum was here, I was knackered and have been going to bed early. At least I'm not sleeping during the day.

My mum left on Saturday afternoon; it was nice to have her here, but also kind of a relief when she went home - I think four days is quite long enough and although she was very well behaved overall, her tendency to focus on the negative is a bit draining sometimes. Anyway, it was a good visit and I think she enjoyed it and at least she had some time off from her normal routine of rushing around, creating chores and forcing food on everyone but not eating much herself! She complains that her partner really needs to lose weight and then proceeds to talk about taking chocolate, apple cake and other Dutch treats home for him... I told her she is a feeder and needs to stop it!

My chemo has been postponed until Friday because my immune system isn't strong enough to deal with it yet. I don't really mind, I just hope it's better by Friday and doesn't need to be put off again, not that I'm desperate to have the pleasure of being on the drip of poison but just because I worry that the greater the periods between chemotherapy, the greater the chance is that the tumor will grow, and because it throws my schedule out! I have been working on the basis of every 3 weeks from last Friday and so friends visiting, work, flying to England, going on holiday... all of these dates were based around the original schedule. Well, in the end I can't change it, so will just have to work with the dates we have.

I'm trying to make myself get into some kind of routine, but it seems really difficult. Actually, it's not difficult, it is just having the discipline to get started; if your day stretches out in front of you and there are lots of useful things you could do but nothing you really have to do, then it's easy to procrastinate and before you know it, it's the middle of the afternoon and you've only achieved one thing. Mum brought a book over with her called 'The Cancer Whisperer' which was written by a woman who has cancer and it's a record of her experiences and her giving advice about how to deal with it, treatments, adjusting to life etc. I have only read the first few pages but it's annoyed me already; she is so positive and says things like 'cancer improved my life'... well, I don't know what her life was like before, but I can say quite categorically that my life was infinitely better without cancer! I'm not saying it's horrendous now, but it's definitely got its drawbacks! She's also used the 'J' word at least twice already which should be banned when talking about the Big C - it's such an overused metaphor. She goes on about making the most of every minute of every day, which of course, is a good way to live your life in general, whether you have an illness or not, but it only serves to make me feel guilty when I think about sitting on the sofa watching TV or wandering aimlessly from website to website.

However, maybe I will take some of her advice; she mentions improving diet and nutrition and it is something I have been thinking about (not doing yet) lately. When I first got the diagnosis one of my colleagues gave me loads of information about controlling/killing cancer with diet. While I'm not sure I believe it is possible to control cancer by diet alone, I can see that having a healthier diet overall can only help you to deal with treatments. One contentious issue is sugar; there is a lot of information about sugar feeding, even causing cancer! I'm not going to do anything extreme, partly because I don't have the discipline, but I am going to try to cut out excess sugar. It's easy to start off with by not drinking fizzy drinks, no cakes, biscuits, prepared food etc. That's easy in theory, but in practice might be harder (I still have one piece of lemon meringue pie staring at me every time I go into the kitchen!). Like I said, I'm not going to be zero tolerance about it, but I do want to try and start making my own food again, instead of buying ready-made stuff like soups etc. The last few months have been focused on eating anything, just to re-gain weight, but now my weight is stable, I don't need to do that anymore.

So all good intentions! As I write this, I am considering going to have a shower (it's 9.30am), but I have been up since 7am working on uploading translated profiles onto a website so I don't feel too bad. It's dry at the moment, so I also want to get out and do a couple of laps of the park and once I have done that I have some cooking planned. I went and bought ingredients for a healthy meal yesterday afternoon but then left it too late to actually make it!