READING TONE

A friend told me that she can gauge how I feel by my blog posts. I admitted that it has been a tough six months or so but I didn’t realize that I was that obvious with the tone of my blog posts. Although I try to give general indicators of how I feel, I usually save the ugly details. For example, when I say that I’m taking narcotics, considering my very high pain tolerance, it can be presumed that it’s not a good day. However, I don’t write about the details of my symptoms too often for several reasons. Firstly, I don’t like to dwell on the negative, especially considering how much worse a lot of other people have it. Secondly, I don’t like to overly concern my kids. They read my blog. Thirdly, I meet with people on a very regular basis to discuss their life challenges. Many of them read my blog too. I don’t want them to feel that my symptoms suggest that they shouldn’t utilize me.

The fact is though that I have strong parts of the day and not so strong parts. Further, I have strong sequential days and days which aren’t so good. It’s those days that sometimes have me considering discontinuing the blog. It’s hard to write something worth reading when things are rather rough and much of my mental energy is devoted to fighting symptoms. I’m sort of getting used to the nausea and stomach pain. The leg cramps are a big concern but I deal with that too. The thing which has been very hard to deal with is my right arm pain and fatigue. In fact, it is a considerable challenge. My arm is something that I’ve been dealing with for many years but these past six months remind of the old days that caused us to move south. It’s really wearing on me. As far as the fatigue goes, some of it is from the constant battle with pain while the rest is probably from my Gleevec induced low red blood cell count. I’ll be interested to not only see the status of my cancer but also see my red blood cell count. My lab test appointment for my oncologist (Dr. Tan) is August 31^st. Oddly enough, that is the anniversary of the day I went through the window and began the saga of my arm.

So, I suppose it’s true that some can not only read my blog words but read my tone too. I admit that I tend to understate my symptoms but that is for good reason, as I described above. In the meantime, I’ll seek to deal with and minimize the negative while accentuating the positive.