Daily Routines

My life has always been very planned out, rather Type-A if you will. All my life it's been: go to school, come home, prepare for the next day, do it again. I've had my adventures, but it's always been very planned out and purposeful. I've never been someone who just called in sick for the day, or took a spontaneous vacation. I've always structured my time so that I knew what I needed to do each day, with to-do lists and tasks to be accomplished. THIS? This has really thrown a monkey-wrench in all of that. While I was at OHSU I had no other option, I wasn't allowed to leave or plan my day, I was stuck.

Now that I am at home, with all of these upcoming, but unscheduled appointments looming in the future? And bone marrow biopsy results that I don't know the outcomes to yet? And a possible remission, but also the possibility that that's not the case? And hearing things like "there will be times when you will be very sick" and "there will be times when you'll have to come in for transfusions based on your blood-work, but we don't know when that will be" and "there will be times when we will have to delay your treatment to allow your body to recover, but we don't know how much time that will take" and "after each phase of treatment there will be another bone marrow biopsy, and hopefully you will still be in remission" and "if you're unable to get into remission with chemotherapy, there is always bone marrow transplant or stem cell transplant options". Wow, that's a lot of freaking uncertainty in my life all of the sudden!

I expected my year to look like me teaching 6th grade science, waking up every morning and going to school with Max, coming home at the end of the day and talking about what we did and how things went, and preparing for the next day. I was hoping to enjoy our weekends being outside, going to the grocery store, going to concerts or on small vacations here and there. But now, things are a bit different. I stay home when he goes to work in the morning, because I'm not allowed to go in public places. That means that I can't set foot in a school for at least 8 months, because schools are like the germiest places ever. I can't really go to the grocery store, unless I wear a surgical mask and promise not to touch anything, so there's no point. And at this point? I'm in such bad shape from being in the hospital that I can't even walk down the street without being completely exhausted. So for the next 8+ months I'll be being driven to and from appointments in Eugene, and when I'm not doing that I will be either in my house or outside (that's where I'm most safe, because the air is clean, I just can't really touch plants or dirt, or anything). This whole change in daily routine is going to be really hard for me, I can tell. I am trying to stay on a normal sleep schedule, getting up around when Max goes to work and going to bed at a decent hour. I will be taking that Chemistry class through the University of Northern Colorado still, and while it's been really hard to get back into the swing of that, thankfully it is a go at your own pace sort of course, so I will do that when I can. And other than that, I am using this time to hone some housewife skills by keeping our house super clean. And I'm trying to get back in some sort of shape so I can eventually walk up a flight of stairs when I come across them.

Speaking of flights of stairs, I am currently half way through my biggest fitness endeavor since coming home. I am currently sitting on the dock on Woahink lake at Karen and Ty's house. It's incredible and beautiful and I'm so thankful to be down here enjoying the sunshine. But at some point I'm going to have to go back up those stairs. 

Pretty sure there's a metaphor in there somewhere.