It's the Little Things

It occurs to me that I may be overthinking this whole cancer thing. Yeah, it's cancer. Yeah, it's scary. Yeah, chemotherapy can be brutal. But in a lot of ways, there's not a whole lot of difference between being treated for cancer and having a nasty cold or the flu.

When you get right down to it, sick is sick. And even if you're just sucking down NyQuil and pulling the covers over your head, you're still dealing with being sick. And the problem with being sick, at least as I'm finding, is that there's just way too much that you're supposed to do on any given day that, now that I'm sick, I just don't want to do. But I suspect the same would be true if I was just fighting off a cold. 

Your mileage may vary, but when I'm sick I don't want to get out of bed, I don't want to take a shower and get dressed, I don't want to eat anything more complicated than cereal, I don't want to see or talk to anyone, I don't want to think complicated thoughts, and I don't want to deal with my responsibilities. I just want to lie in bed and sleep. 

If this was a cold I could get way with that for a week or two. So I suppose this is where cancer does sort of differentiate itself from being indeterminately sick. When you're sick, you can stay in bed for a week, let the rest of life lapse while you're recovering, and then get up, catch up and get on with life. But it's hard to just stay in bed for month after month after month. Eventually, you do have to muster the energy to at least accomplish the minimum requirements of adult life. 

Which actually leads to the next big challenge: how can you redefine certain aspects of your life so that they are no longer part of those minimum requirements. For example, I've always been resistant to the idea of setting up my bills to automatically pay. It just feels weird to me to have your employer automatically dumping your paycheck into the bank, and then your cable provider (or whatever) automatically sucking their payment out. But I'm starting to reach the point where I just don't want paying bills to be part of my adult responsibilities anymore. I don't mind spending the money, but the act of writing a check or filing out the little boxes online just demands way more energy than I want to spend. The same logic is going to have me hiring a house cleaner pretty soon. 

It'll be interesting to see how many of the things that normally make up day to day life I can get rid . But as soon as I think about that I start to wonder, if you get rid of all the little things that make up a life, do you still have a life?

But that's a thread my chemo fogged brain cells just aren't up to following right now.