Cancer Stinks

Actually, though, that may just be me. 

This occurred to me as I was sitting in my chair yesterday in my pajama pants when I received a text from my brother-in-law suggesting a movie. I had an hour to get ready, and at the end of that hour I had to be both ready to go out in public and also have enough energy to drive ten miles up the road and then to make it through dinner and a movie. 

As has become my habit, the first thing I start doing is striking all the inessentials from my to-do list. 

Moving through life with cancer -- at least cancer once it reaches this stage -- is a lot like that scene from the movie Apollo 13 where, as the spaceship is returning toward earth, NASA has to try to figure out how to restart the capsule. The astronauts have been holed up in the lunar lander, the space capsule has been shut down and basically frozen solid, and now they've got to get it up and running and ready for re-entry, but without ever exceeding twelve amps, or six volts, or twenty-three joules or whatever the measure is that will blow the fuses and basically kill the mission. 

So there's a scene where the engineers in Houston keep attempting, and re-attempting, to turn on a mock-up of the capsule without exceeding the stated limit.

That's pretty much how my days go now. You have your desired goal (say, get ready to go to the movies), you have your desired to do list (say, put the dishes in the dishwasher, take a shower, get dressed, etc.), you have a sense of how much energy each of those things will take, and you have the ability to rest, as the sole method of generating more energy. And so you start making the calculations and doing the trades. 

First, the non-essentials like "Put the dishes in the dishwasher" immediately come off the list. Those can wait until later when you've got energy to spare.

Then you make the easy trades, swapping Crocs or slippers for shoes that tie and socks. (You would not believe how much energy it takes to  put on a pair of real shoes and socks.) You trade a button down shirt for a T-shirt, because the energy it takes to button all those buttons can be better used somewhere else. 

And then you look at the things that once upon a time you would've thought to be essential, like, say, take a shower before you go out, and you second guess. You figure you'll be in a mostly empty dark theater where no one knows you, and you took a shower yesterday so you can't really be that dirty, especially since you haven't really done much beyond lay around in your pajamas, and since ten minutes not spent showering is ten minutes that can be spent resting and accumulating more energy, the trade off seems worth it. So you skip the shower.

But then you get on the road and realize that you perhaps weren't quite as clean as you thought you were. Which doesn't invalidate the trade off -- if taking a shower, regardless of how necessary, would've consumed more than the available energy, leaving you unable to actually jump in the car and drive, the shower's got to go -- but it does perhaps readjust your estimate of the appropriate social distance to maintain between yourself and anybody around you.

And the next day you start with a new list of items and a new set of energy values, and you do it all again. 

Which, in all honesty, means there are days where you sort of stink. At least that's proven to be true in my case. I suppose I can't speak for anyone else (though the number of patients at the SCCA dressed in slippers and sweatpants suggests I'm not the only one making these kinds of calculations.)