Happy!

I had a surprisingly great day today, so I just have to document it. I worry that this blog is too much WOE IS ME, so I should make an effort to write about the good days, lest you get the impression I'm all gloom and doom (even though I am, hahaha).

I can't begin to describe the level of exhaustion I've felt over the past week. My body is still adjusting to going back to work, and on top of this, it's exam week, so I've been grading, grading, grading, and more grading. Also, yesterday, I had to cover a class for a colleague. The class was one that was originally mine, but that I passed off to aforementioned colleague, so when she asked me to sit in for her due to a family issue, I could hardly say no. Even though it was just an exam - so literally, all I had to do was SIT there - it exhausted me, and I came home and took an hour-long nap.

Then, today, I had to go back to another class that another colleague has been covering for me. So basically this was my first FULL week back. I was super nervous about going back to this particular class, because it's my nemesis class, and no matter what I do the students seem to hate me or the class or both. Also, the colleague who was covering it for me gets way better teaching evaluations than I do (granted, she has never taught this particular class before), so I was nervous the students would be bummed I was back. Plus, I'm not exactly feeling super confident clunking into the class on crutches and all, ya know? AND on top of all of this, today's material was possibly theeeee most boring material I cover in the entire course. I can't think of a worse way to come back than to show up on crutches, return exams (which always pisses some people off), and then talk about cell membranes and free energy change and entropy and thermodynamics for three freaking hours. >:-(

BUT! The class went really well, and my students seemed super enthusiastic and engaged - or at least as engaged as you can be about thermodynamics. (Snore.) At the end of class, a couple students sort of shouted out, 'Thank you, Waning!' Like... for what? Showing up to class and lecturing? Last I checked, that's my job. LOL. But it was very sweet, like they were really happy I was back. (This class is second semester intro biology, so I've had many of them before. And to be fair to myself, I did my very hardest to make the lecture as entertaining as humanly possible, complete with pictures of divers, my son at the top of a climbing wall, myself jumping out of a swing, and failed human towers.) My students' enthusiasm totally made my day! It actually energized me and made me feel happy to be back, rather than counting down the days until the end of the semester, which is what I'm normally doing around this time in the semester.

And OMG, despite the morale boost, I came home and graded and graded, then took an hour-long nap. And then I graded some more. And now I'm soooooo ready for bed, but I'm feeling very happy and optimistic nonetheless.

As self-conscious as I feel about my situation, I'm learning to accept it, and even embrace some aspects of it. I don't have an openly warm fuzzy personality, and a lot of times my students find me somewhat cold and standoffish. Not that I want to play the WOE IS ME card, but... sometimes you need some extra help. LOL. While I'm feeling vulnerable, they're seeing me as more human. They don't necessarily know a lot of details about my ordeal, but they do know it was enough that I missed a month of class and now I still can't walk, yet I'm there for them anyway. What's humbling for me might just be a good thing.

Silver linings, silver linings. It's at least something to cling to for the moment.

Tired

Warning: This is going to be one of my philosophical, over-the-top emo posts, without much substance.

I haven't been writing as much as I want to, partly because I haven't really been able to understand what I'm feeling enough to put it into words. Even when I do write, I feel like I'm always starting with some sort of disclaimer along the lines of I don't really know how to describe what I'm feeling, but listen to this bullshit anyway. Or something like that.

I now fully understand what it is that I'm feeling, and I can describe it in a single word. More than anything else, I am 

TIRED.

Yeah, there are other emotions going through my head, but all of them are some sort of rendition of TIRED.

TIRED of surgery.

TIRED from surgery. 

TIRED of being on crutches.

TIRED from being on crutches.

TIRED of pain.

TIRED from pain.

TIRED of going to doctors.

TIRED from going to doctors.

TIRED of not being able to do all the things I want to do.

TIRED from doing things I shouldn't be doing, but have to do anyway.

TIRED of X.

TIRED of Y.

TIRED of Z.

TIRED from X, Y, and Z.

TIRED of being TIRED.

I'm running out steam. 

There are some days when I look forward to dying, being done with all of this. But fortunately, evolution serves me well here; I come from a long line of ancestors - human and pre-human - who are here because we are born with the tools be survivors. That's what organisms do. They survive. The idea that life should give us some sort of fulfillment or self-satisfaction is unique to humans, and a privileged set of humans at that. The rest of the living world just survives.

And so here I am. I'm surviving, and even a little bit more than that. So I'm winning, no? 

Last I wrote, I was heading back to work, and my husband was heading out of town for work. In so many ways, the week was hell, but in so many ways, surviving it was so uplifting that I think it did more for my recovery than any other time in this recovery. In fact, right now, I feel

AMAZING.

I realize that I am so, so lucky in so many regards. I have a great support system in place, and for that I am so grateful. My Chair at work has been beyond supportive, and got me a last-minute offload so that I am only teaching 3/4 time this semester. As well, one of my colleagues who is covering one of my classes for me agreed to teach it for two more weeks, through the first exam, so I was able to ease into work by just having one class to worry about. That made going back to work so much less stressful than it would have been otherwise.

Regardless, I feel ridiculously TIRED right now, but the fact that I'm still here and still functioning and I haven't killed one of my kids, and I even managed to get them to school on time all week, is AMAZING. 

Laugh if you have to, but it's the little things. For me, it's all about the little things. 

And if you put enough little things together, you can get to something big. 

Last I wrote, I was worked up about teaching on crutches. Throughout all of this, this has been my biggest source of stress, more than the surgery itself. I am an introvert, which I understand is difficult for people to believe, considering I regularly lecture to large numbers of students for a living. Even after a decade of teaching, I still get nervous to the point of nausea before most of my classes. I realize my students are scrutinizing my every move, and I hate to bring any extra attention to myself by say, oh, arriving to class on crutches. I even hate that I'm using Mobileg crutches, the special ergonomic crutches for people who are going to be on crutches forever and a freaking day, because people notice them, and comment on how fancy they are, and I hate the extra attention of having 'fancy' crutches. 

That said, I arrived at my classes on my fancy crutches this week, delivered the damn lectures, and it was very anti-climactic, in a good way. I cared way more about being on crutches than my students did. At least, I think so. Honestly, it was no big deal. The biggest deal was getting to my classroom from my office. I wasn't sure how long it would take me, so on the first day, I left my office 35 minutes before my class started. It only took me about 10 minutes to get to the classroom, so I had 25 minutes before class started, but it was a good thing I did. I was so. damn. TIRED. after making the trek, I needed those 25 minutes to recover. My legs felt like Jello. It was also a little awkward because I was sitting outside the classroom with a number of my students, and they were definitely staring at me, but they didn't say anything to me because they had never seen me before, and most of them are 18-year-olds with worse social skills than I have. LOL. The second class was better, because now that students know who I am, some of them will talk to me before class, so it's not as weird as just sitting there. I also decided that even though I normally leave my cell phone in my office, I should bring it with me to class so I have something to do while I'm waiting. 

So while my goal was to just SURVIVE the week, I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to actually make PROGRESS during the week. Even between Monday and Wednesday, I noticed a huge difference in my energy level. And even though my week was beyond exhausting, I made time to go to physical therapy on both Monday and Friday, since Jerry is so helpful. 

And as it turns out, Jerry gave me the boost that I needed. He didn't push me a lot in PT, because by going back to work, I'm already doing so much more than I was before. In fact, he told me that the best way for me to gain strength was to sleep more, and nap whenever I can (!!!). (Have I mentioned that I love this guy?) 

BUT. What was really the boost that I needed was the reminder that I AM actually progressing, no matter how small the baby steps may seem. At my appointment on Friday, Jerry asked me how I was feeling, and I said that I was feeling about the same as I had before, and I considered that progress, considering how hellish my week had been. Then he asked me how my left hip (non operated hip) was feeling. I said it felt pretty good. Then he asked how my back was feeling. I said it felt pretty good. Then he reminded me that last week, my left hip and my back were both killing me, so the fact that I self-reported them as feeling 'pretty good' was progress. And, the fact that I was progressing despite this hellish week was good news - really good progress - indeed.

Like I said, it's the little things.

They're so little, you don't notice them on a daily basis. But they're there. Jerry had detailed notes from my first visit, and felt good about my progress. I didn't feel good about my progress until he reminded me of my pain levels last week, and the fact that I pretty much couldn't walk at all (AT ALL) the first time I saw him.

He reminded me that this isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. Whenever anyone pulls cliches like this on me, I instinctively pull back and shudder a little bit. Cancerland is full of cliches and cute little sayings like 'cancerversary' that make me want to throw up over and over again, and I'm finding that the hip dysplasia world is no different. So when Jerry told me this recovery is a marathon, I looked him in the eye and informed him that I used to run track, and I was a sprinter. The longest race I was good at was 10 seconds long, so he would have to bear with me and my impatience. I'm not a marathon runner, and never will be. 

Nonetheless, slow and steady is my new reality. I've fully bought into the idea that I've gone through way too much to end up with a limp when all of this is said and done. So despite the fact that the slooooooow pace of my recovery is. killing. me, I'm trying so, so hard to be a good patient, and understand that for whatever reason, no matter how infuriating it may be to me, my body needs to take its own sweet time in this recovery. 

They say slow and steady wins the race, which I know isn't always true. I beat plenty of slow and steady people in my days as an athlete. But this isn't a race; it isn't a competition. It's only me. As Jerry told me, it isn't as easy as doing three sets of ten, and for people with athletic backgrounds, that can be infuriating.

So... I've had to change my mindset. Rather than seeing my current state of being as something temporary that I must overcome ASAP, somehow in the past week I've changed. I now fully accept that this is completely different from an injury; it is a condition - a permanent one - that I must embrace and deal with. Dude, I'm, like... disabled. It's hard to even write that. But somehow thinking of it this way, rather than, whoa, I've got this injury that's going to take me years to get over, is easier for me. Still, it's hard to wrap my mind around that. 

But.

I'm too tired to fight it. 

I am so, so tired.