Saturday, June 01, 2013

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

I mentioned this earlier in the context of waiting for a final diagnosis. That was true then, but I think it's still just as true now. Or as Jeff put it the other day, "every part is the hardest part."  But I still categorize what I'm experiencing at the moment as "waiting," because we are waiting, and will be waiting through three more cycles of chemo, to witness progress (we hope) on a PET scan.  In the meantime, we just have to trust that the vicious drugs are working their magic.

I haaaate waiting.

And in the meantime, we experience our fair share of normal challenges which exacerbate the waiting problem.  On some days - those ones when your dear sister-in-law is leaving to go home, when you have slept less than six hours with at least four interruptions, when you don't get coffee as soon as you need it, when your elder child is flipping her $*#% instead of napping, and so on and so forth - you feel this sense of impatience and a deep sense of being uprooted and anxious more than others. I realized today, too, that part of what I'm feeling is flat-out bitterness. It is awful not to know what's coming next. And legitimately scary. And I am bitter about having to go through all this crap.

Sometimes, on days like yesterday, I'm able to squelch these feelings and "focus on the positive" or live in the moment or whatever.  But at other times, negative feelings overwhelm any others. Such is today.

Thus, I've discovered that it really doesn't help to placate myself by "hoping for the best" or trusting that "things will get better." I certainly hope that's the case, but it might not be. So I'm going to allow myself to just be bitter when these feelings bubble up. And, hopefully, through this process I will learn to rest and live through all this turmoil. Right now I feel no real "sense of peace," but if I can learn to find that, despite all this despised uncertainty, that will be a real win.

Blergh. Yours,

Katina the Sleep Deprived

No comments: