"Not the past.”
CW: needles in my body!
I was clutching at straws. Today was day 7 since infusion day, and day 5 of feeling horribly hungover, with none of the imbibing. I tried acupuncture.
Now, the only other time I had tried acupuncture was in pregnancy with Vivian, when I was dealing with horrendous pelvic girdle pain and "over it" syndrome. It was not a great experience, and I spent most of the time being lectured about my low blood volume and how I should eat steak to rectify it. The fact that I have been a 25-year vegetarian meant nothing, and I was told that I could "try" eating beets or cherries in bulk, but the only real way to replace blood is to consume blood (hard pass), so I will be cursed with a life time of feeling sluggish.
I digress.
Today's appointment was not only helpful, but refreshing. We talked. A lot. We talked about the side effects I'm dealing with. We talked about my poor sleep and interesting medication-induced dreams. We talked about how a month ago, I was only used to taking a multivitamin, probiotic, and allergy pill every day and ibuprofen and Zantac as needed. My body has been thrown into a tailspin with the sudden extensive list of medications I'm on and will be on for the long term. We talked about how I rarely got sick before all of this. Once I was on the table, she stood there talking gently and monitoring my pulse. She said..."you're so tired."
Man! I nearly cried. I am so tired.
But more meaningfully, before she started inserting the needles, she stopped, still holding my hand, and said: "I know you have a lot of thoughts running through your mind when you try to sleep, giving you dreams. But you cannot go back and change the past. You caught it early, it is early stages, and you are in treatment. And you focus on that. Not the past."
Whew! This is a word that I needed today. I have lived by a similar motto for some time now; since I didn't pass the bar exam the first time. Long story not much shorter: somewhere along the way, two full essays did not transmit to the bar examiners and therefore 2/5 of the written portion of my exam received a "0." It was year two of the "laptop program" and they let us use our own laptops. Mine was freezing up all morning, and at lunch time, everyone around me exclaimed that they were so stressed on my behalf, because I had to keep raising my hand. It was doing that thing where you type three sentences and it takes 30 seconds to catch up, and then you spend precious time correcting your mistakes. I didn't feel good leaving the exam, I stressed nonstop for months until results came out, and then I signed in and thought my world was ruined. I requested a copy of my essays, to help me study for round two. And when they arrived, I was devastated to see that the first two essays were BLANK. The bar examiners ended up finding my two essays on a flash drive, and graded them independently and determined that I failed by two points if I remember right. Exams are typically not graded in a vacuum - they are graded relative to all of the other essays. So mine being graded several months later received a different level of scrutiny than they would have at the time of the exam. And after all of that, the chair of the bar examiners called me himself to apologize, and said "I feel confident that you are going to pass the next time." Do you, now?
It took me a while to pull out of that funk. And then I had a conversation with a mentor that changed my life. He said "You would be better suited to take a yoga class, than a bar refresher course. The problem is not that you don't know the content. The problem is that you let your anxiety take the exam for you." Whoooooa. It was so right. I had to stop dwelling on the what if and the unknown and control what I could. I picked up Joyce Meyer's Battlefield of the Mind, and absorbed it. I wouldn't have been ready for the book before that, but I was at that point and from that moment, everything changed. When I went in for the second test, I finished the exam early, checked my work, and sat patiently until time was up. The person sharing a table with me asked what I did to prepare, because I was so calm. I left knowing that I had passed. It was truly life changing.
And now here I am. I have done a relatively good job of not dwelling too much on the past. I would be lying if I didn't have questions. You know, the what?, why?, when? how? of randomly getting cancer. I have not "blamed" one thing or another, even if my "non-superstitious" self has been ditching aspartame and old scratched up pans. But there is truly no use in beating myself up with the why. We can't control what happens to us, but we can control how we react. Hopefully someone else can use this word today, too.
Oh, and I felt markedly better and stronger when I left than when I had gone in!
I was clutching at straws. Today was day 7 since infusion day, and day 5 of feeling horribly hungover, with none of the imbibing. I tried acupuncture.
Now, the only other time I had tried acupuncture was in pregnancy with Vivian, when I was dealing with horrendous pelvic girdle pain and "over it" syndrome. It was not a great experience, and I spent most of the time being lectured about my low blood volume and how I should eat steak to rectify it. The fact that I have been a 25-year vegetarian meant nothing, and I was told that I could "try" eating beets or cherries in bulk, but the only real way to replace blood is to consume blood (hard pass), so I will be cursed with a life time of feeling sluggish.
I digress.
Today's appointment was not only helpful, but refreshing. We talked. A lot. We talked about the side effects I'm dealing with. We talked about my poor sleep and interesting medication-induced dreams. We talked about how a month ago, I was only used to taking a multivitamin, probiotic, and allergy pill every day and ibuprofen and Zantac as needed. My body has been thrown into a tailspin with the sudden extensive list of medications I'm on and will be on for the long term. We talked about how I rarely got sick before all of this. Once I was on the table, she stood there talking gently and monitoring my pulse. She said..."you're so tired."
Man! I nearly cried. I am so tired.
But more meaningfully, before she started inserting the needles, she stopped, still holding my hand, and said: "I know you have a lot of thoughts running through your mind when you try to sleep, giving you dreams. But you cannot go back and change the past. You caught it early, it is early stages, and you are in treatment. And you focus on that. Not the past."
Whew! This is a word that I needed today. I have lived by a similar motto for some time now; since I didn't pass the bar exam the first time. Long story not much shorter: somewhere along the way, two full essays did not transmit to the bar examiners and therefore 2/5 of the written portion of my exam received a "0." It was year two of the "laptop program" and they let us use our own laptops. Mine was freezing up all morning, and at lunch time, everyone around me exclaimed that they were so stressed on my behalf, because I had to keep raising my hand. It was doing that thing where you type three sentences and it takes 30 seconds to catch up, and then you spend precious time correcting your mistakes. I didn't feel good leaving the exam, I stressed nonstop for months until results came out, and then I signed in and thought my world was ruined. I requested a copy of my essays, to help me study for round two. And when they arrived, I was devastated to see that the first two essays were BLANK. The bar examiners ended up finding my two essays on a flash drive, and graded them independently and determined that I failed by two points if I remember right. Exams are typically not graded in a vacuum - they are graded relative to all of the other essays. So mine being graded several months later received a different level of scrutiny than they would have at the time of the exam. And after all of that, the chair of the bar examiners called me himself to apologize, and said "I feel confident that you are going to pass the next time." Do you, now?
It took me a while to pull out of that funk. And then I had a conversation with a mentor that changed my life. He said "You would be better suited to take a yoga class, than a bar refresher course. The problem is not that you don't know the content. The problem is that you let your anxiety take the exam for you." Whoooooa. It was so right. I had to stop dwelling on the what if and the unknown and control what I could. I picked up Joyce Meyer's Battlefield of the Mind, and absorbed it. I wouldn't have been ready for the book before that, but I was at that point and from that moment, everything changed. When I went in for the second test, I finished the exam early, checked my work, and sat patiently until time was up. The person sharing a table with me asked what I did to prepare, because I was so calm. I left knowing that I had passed. It was truly life changing.
And now here I am. I have done a relatively good job of not dwelling too much on the past. I would be lying if I didn't have questions. You know, the what?, why?, when? how? of randomly getting cancer. I have not "blamed" one thing or another, even if my "non-superstitious" self has been ditching aspartame and old scratched up pans. But there is truly no use in beating myself up with the why. We can't control what happens to us, but we can control how we react. Hopefully someone else can use this word today, too.
Oh, and I felt markedly better and stronger when I left than when I had gone in!
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