So, I've finally made it back to work. I'm lucky enough to work with amazing, kind, brilliant and dedicated people. But their brightness and quickness makes me blink like I'm staring into the noon sun sometimes. Friends say that I seem like I always was. Able to speak my mind, see the big picture. But this return to work has been hard. You see, a cog slipped, the cd got a scratch, a gear got stuck, and so things that I took for granted are shockingly, ridiculously hard.
Reading and writing is hard. Writing is the worst, instead of being cathartic, instead of being able to just 'fall into' it, and let the words and thoughts flow, they get lost. They swirl and twirl around me and as I chase one down, the follow-up, the next line is lost. This damned post is like pouring cold molasses in a freezer. It's there, but it won't flow. At work, I flew out of my office in frustration trying to capture some thoughts in a simple email. An email that took me literally hours to write, instead of minutes.
And, then there is the reading. I can read, I can analyze, but the stuff I read seems to keep getting filed in the wastebasket in my brain. And, get dumped before I can go and fetch it. So, my viewpoint is there, but what I've read is not.
I've known for months that all was not the same. That I wasn't the same as I was, pre-radiation, with a couple of scars to show for it. And so I dragged my feet and dreaded returning to work. I've spoken to my doctors, over and over again, and there is no magic potion to make this all better. The Radiation Oncologist, when I finally saw him and told him that something wasn't right, was pretty direct. And, quick to point out that it couldn't be the radiation. When he turned to me and said "well, your brains aren't in your mouth", I felt like a ballon pricked by a needle. My GP is less sure of the cause, and I know what I know about how I feel and when. But the cause matters not. The impact is the same. I find a bit of comfort in my kind colleague who has fought her own Big C battles and relates to this feeling of being less than before. And, of course, I'm just supremely lucky to be working with friends... people who I trust and whose support means the world to me.
And, so I do all the things that I'm told to do and some that just help. I see my acupuncturist, I do yoga classes with an amazingly talented and soothing instructor, I practice mindfulness, I see a psychologist. I have a little pit crew assembled to put me back on the road. But, I dunno. For you see, gentle reader, I'm writing this with tears streaming down my face, and a headache pounding in the back of my skull. It's so crazy hard to do this, you see. I'm writing, rewriting, getting lost, rereading and getting lost again in my own muddied thoughts.
I wasn't going to broadcast this, who wants folks to know that there's a slipped gear? But I've got to practice this stupidly, ridiculously hard, thing. And, this is what is top of mind to blog about... so there you have it. Here's to hoping that this blogging practice is like a yoga practice. It may look like crap, but I'm just going to breathe through it, and keep trying.