New Adjustments

  It has been a while again. Now, where was I?


I am about 11 days into phase 2. Phase 2 started on my birthday, and it started off feeling like good news. For all that I was frustrated with my insurer over some things they hadn’t paid for, my co-pays on some very expensive drugs are surprisingly manageable. So, I got an injection to last me for 90 days and a bottle of pills, also to last me for 90 days, and the journey began. For the next almost a week, I would wake up every morning, and when Karen said to me, “How are you?“, my response would be, “Nol weirdness so far.“


There was a certain innocence in that. These are important medicines with systemic effects, and those effects take weeks to really take hold. If there had been sudden effects, that probably would’ve been bad. But the fact that there were no sudden bad effects didn’t mean they weren’t going to be any discomfort, any awareness that this was a difficult adjustment.


So about a week in, I suddenly started feeling like I couldn’t do as much. I could still go out and work in the yard, even in the heat. But after an hour in the yard, I needed at least an hour resting before I could get onto anything else. Karen, she who loves me, points out that with this last birthday I’m now 70 years old, so it may not be the meds at all. I am aware that age is part of this.


That was part of my experience this week when I met with a trainer. Many things I’ve read suggested that for some of the risks and some of the effects of these drugs, incorporating resistance training into my exercise could make things better, could keep me from losing strength. Working with a trainer and adjusting to machines, I realized how much I had lost. Over the last year and a half, I’ve been an awful lot of time recovering from one thing or another: the kidney stone, the blockage between my kidney and our bladder, the various phases of dealing with that blockage, and all of those meant I was doing less. So when the trainer put me on a leg press machine and what I was capable of moving was remarkably unimpressive I had to acknowledge that I have fallen behind. That was Friday. It didn’t help that just trying to do sit – to – stand exercises, caused their own kind of pain yesterday.


And then on top of everything else, last night I popped a fever. I never hit 101, and I never felt particularly bad, but Karen knew just by holding my arm that something was off. Through the evening and into today that fever has gone away., And we have no idea what it relates to. Is it related to my therapy? Did I encounter a bug somewhere? Is this my reaction to the rest of the world, standing around and saying, “Where did that handcart come from, and why is it so hot?“ It certainly could be related to my therapy. But, again, it’s really too soon to know.


This is an exercise in grace: grace, that I can give myself, grace, that I can appreciate from others, grace, that I can seek from God. in fact, with time and effort, I should be able to rebuild some strength. I should be able to rebuild some endurance. I should be able to continue making a contribution at home and in my community. I am coming to embrace the importance of those things, even as I face the possibility that I can’t do much more.


Readers, God bless you all.

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