I have sorely missed blogging. It's been a long while. I had two major deadlines that required me to dive right into my academic life. Yep, I was revising two papers that I submitted for publication. Those are papers about two research studies I did. Nope, they are not my dissertation topics. They were just two research projects I decided to do for fun during my doctoral program. Yep, I am a nerd. One was submitted long before I got my diagnosis. One was submitted about a month before my surgery at Mike's encouragement. I was ready to quit everything after my cancer diagnosis but Mike told me I had to keep on living my life. I forgot all about those submissions as I battled the big C.
The editors came back to me about a month ago with feedback. I planned to wait until the summer to return to my academic life, meaning get back to work on my dissertation proposal, as I wanted to give myself some more time to recover. Nope. The publishers had a deadline. Why did they have to come at the same time!?! I don't know. I felt overwhelmed because I continue to struggle with filling up my schedule. I still find myself exhausted at the end of day, having accomplished not as much as I would before the cancer. I just dove right in. I finished one manuscript last week. I finished another one today. Phew. I am tired but I'm having this high. It's the same high I feel when I passed my candidacy and comprehensive exams in the doctoral program.
I was remarking to a friend the other day that I don't know if I could do my first semester all over again. My first semester in the doctorate program was like this: I was working full-time and I was taking six courses at the same time. Granted, it was a suicide mission but I pulled it off. Post-surgery, can I do that? I don't know. I'm tired a lot. A breast cancer survivor friend who has been in remission for two years said she's still tired. Cancer is like that. It slams you right in the face when you least expect it. And when you are done, you need the time to recover from whatever your body has been through. I was on a good track of returning to my workout routine but that slowed down recently. I had been having some pains for several weeks. I thought it was part of the whole process. Two weeks ago, the pain got so bad that I could not sit comfortably nor do sitting poses in yoga. I decided to see my primary care physician last Tuesday to see what's up. She found that it was an abscess that has been growing for weeks and it finally got the best of me. I am on antibiotics that is making it go away slowly. I am happy to report that the pain is slowly going away. I avoided taking pain medications because I needed a clear head to write the papers! Now that I am done, it is nice knowing that it's an option if the pain bothers me really bad.
I ran into a breast cancer survivor at a gathering the other night. She said that she learned one thing. She would just allow herself to schedule one thing/activity for each day and not commit to subsequent activities unless she could manage to finish the first one. I felt that was a good advice and something I could live with. Rather than feeling overwhelmed and drowning to the point that I get frustrated with myself for not accomplishing as much as I set out to. Again, another valuable lesson in patience.
The past two weeks it's been all about writing, rewriting, and rewriting. I ached to do other things such as writing more entries for this blog. I wanted to continue working on my art project. I wanted to... I wanted to... I wanted to... yada yada. Now that I am done with the papers, I knew that the first thing I wanted to do was to blog! Now I want to crash and have a long slumber. I certainly lost sleep over those papers and I am still recovering. Good night, folks!
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