Regular life and a schedule

Awake again in the night. Every night is different since chemo and I started having this thing. Some nights I am up at 2 am and in bed again at 5:50. Night before last I got a glorious full night of sleep. All the conditions were right and I slept through the night and felt well rested. This morning I woke at about 5 am. I feel rested but I wonder what it will take to get a regular schedule of sleep and wake. I ponder this as the process that destroyed my schedule looms ahead. Chemotherapy destroys all schedules.

The chemo is a mess of preparation chemicals that make it so your body won't react violently to the chemotherapy, and chemotherapy itself is a mess of noxious chemicals that are so bad the staff has to wear bio suits just to introduce it into your body. I wrote before about the effects of the chemo prep and chemo itself. The day of chemo is a schedule killer itself. The prep chemicals make you drowsy and sedated. These are different things really, drowsy makes you detached from the world and sedated means you will sleep for an inordinate amount of time later. Chemo just makes you want to be sleeping and detached from the world. So you sleep all day, some of the night, then all morning, up for an hour, most of the afternoon is spent in bed and at bedtime you feel like crap but can't sleep. So sleep becomes an issue of when and how well, for months on end. When I went on chemo holiday I thought I could get a normal sleep cycle. Seems you can't have a normal sleep cycle if you don't have a normal life cycle. And I don't.

I ponder establishing a schedule only to have it destroyed in six weeks or so. What is the point? On the other hand there is discipline and always striving to get what you should have into each day of your life. I should have exercise and I should have human contact and I should have a normal meal cycle. I could work to achieve that for the short term and be happy with that for a short period of time. And then try to establish as normal a cycle as I can during chemo. Now there would be a challenge. I think maybe I will this time.

My wife tries to allay my fears of chemo. She says the biopsy and the stent placement made me very weak and caused a lot of pain when I started chemo the first time and that made the whole thing nearly unbearable. I will acknowledge that later on in the cycle I was pretty much unaffected by the chemo infusions. Except for that whole steroid thing that kept me awake from Thursday afternoon to Friday night. I mean other than that. Okay so maybe I can plan a regular life schedule and get some exercise and get out of the house and do some of the things I want to do and just have one huge gap from Thursday morning to Saturday morning and live with that. Sounds like a government program that works some of the time but not all the time.

On the other hand I am liking the idea of living my life like a teenager, let it flow and see what it is like. Everyday is a new beginning. Ad hoc lifestyle of the undisciplined youngster. I have that now, I'm not seeing a great benefit to it.

I think I will try a short term process. First I will fix breakfast for my wife, have a light meal myself and go to the gym. then let the rest of the day plan itself. Or maybe do what I call the 'trek' where I walk for about an hour and a half at top speed and cover about 6 or 7 miles. It is cool this morning so I can not end up sweat soaked like I did in September when it was 80 degrees at sunup. Just something to break the tedium of indolence. Then there is the whole 'getting out of the house' requirement.

I haven't worked outside the house literally since about 2001. My last days at my last office job were spent waiting for something to go wrong so I would get a chance to do something. I spent a lot of time waiting for the phone to ring so I almost never went to the office. I sat at home and surfed the net. Then I had a business I ran out of the house. Lots of activity, not much money and finally no enthusiasm for the business. Now I sit home and look for a job. I always forget and get on line and look for a real job, then halfway down the third job site I remember, 1/4/2010, the day lights may go out for 18 weeks or more. Even if the world isn't completely dark, that doesn't mean I will be able to work full time. To quote another cancer victim 'it depends on how I feel'. Yeah, plan a schedule when you don't know if you'll be up and ready or nauseous and tired. So I need to plan some fall back positions. I'll let you know how that goes.