A defining night of calm in pain

One of the side effects of postpartum and chemo for me has been acute ache in my joints and muscles. It's sometimes so much that I can't possible fathom to translate it into any positive thing for myself to fake the smile. You know as they say, Fake it till you make it. I've been struggling with it for last 3 nights and in the first 2 nights, I've been quite panicky about it. My brain wasn't able to process it as a known degree of pain and I needed to take pain killers to sleep for a few hours.

But yesterday was different!

One of the key differences I think has been this confrontation my father in law had with me that this bones ache which I was thinking of more as a postpartum impact was actually more of a chemo side effect. 

I also started to feel this numbness in my finger tips all the more. Previously I was of the view that the numbness / whatever was happening with the fingers was more because of dryness out of using too much sanitiser these days during my hospital visits. 

I took to the internet and did some light reading to find that all this actually could be chemo / cancer. I was shaken but it also helped me quickly internalise the fact that it could be here to stay for longer than what I was imagining. What do you do then? How do you deal with something like that? Nobody teaches you this stuff, not at school, not in MBA, nowhere, nobody. But life is a teacher more profound than any we know! 

The only thing in your own control is actually how you respond to it with your mind, as the body is somewhat out of control in this case. Believe me, mind is a very powerful thing! You can almost train it and live a year extra or of more quality even if you are terminally ill. In my entire cancer treatment, one focus for me I hope to achieve is - How do I possibly train my brain to fight this out? 

While I am trying to work on this each day with some hope, some fails; Last night was quite defining for me personally.  My muscle pains continued but I wanted to mentally accept it and become calm about it and still try to get some sleep without taking painkiller. I was able to do it with small sleep cycles while listening to some music on and off. I'm quite happy about this.

Overall, It's my burden and I want to coach myself to deal with it. After all, it's more like a marathon we are running with our cure for this cancer rather than a short sprint!

Over and out, Ciao :)