Today is my birthday. I turn 31. I have to say, the past year has been the hardest of my life so it can only go up from here, right? Selling our house and moving, starting to work again, tumor and cancer diagnosis followed by treatments, and our bigs starting full day public school. I have half a year of this maintenance chemo treatment and the goal for the year is NED (no evidence of disease). It sounds morbid to think this way, but I’m wondering if every birthday, start of the new calendar year, and summer “cancerversary” will briefly make me think “How many more years do I have left?” This one already has. Maybe everyone thinks this way on their birthday as they get older and hit the age milestones, maybe they don’t. Of course, it leads to all the other “what if’s” like seeing the kids having boy/girlfriends, graduate from high school and college, getting married, and having kids of their own.
I’m still sleeping very poorly. I’m up every couple hours all night and lately been in the habit of being awake from 4-5am. It’s so frustrating. I’m trying all sorts of things to see if it helps. So far, I’m blaming the steroid. Directly following my surgery, I was on so much of it that I couldn’t sleep more than a few hours a day when they told me I’d be sleeping more than half the day. I stepped down by 1/3rd this week, but it will still be over a month to get completely off without having the relapse of symptoms or withdrawal effects. So far, I haven’t had the withdrawal headache from this step down that I did when I last tried to wean off. After being on some dose of this for the majority of 4 months, it’s getting really old.
During the month that I was off (between surgery and radiation), I was actually able to work out and get some of my physical stamina back. I had started walking and jogging again. Now, I’m just too tired and don’t want to take away my physical energy needed to do the other stuff required of me. Once I start sleeping better, my plan is to restart the 5k running program. There’s a 5k charity run that benefits the National Brain Tumor Association in early May that I would like to do. I think that’s an attainable goal, even with my last chemo round being scheduled for that last week of March and my other major goal of the year being to pass the engineering certification exam in April.
So today, I stopped for Starbucks on my way to work. I was tired from my bad night sleep so I left work early to take a bath and a nap. The family had pizza and cake at home. My parents sent presents for me to open, which was awesome. After homework, peeling oranges for kid school Halloween party tomorrow, and putting them to bed, C and I watched a movie. And lots of birthday wishes. It was a nice day.
