A week and a half. Almost there. I’d found myself counting, which says something about how the days had been feeling. Getting through an ordinary morning was taking more effort than I wanted it to, and I was having trouble explaining exactly what was wrong.
There was the buzzing inside. More curtsying. Words getting skipped when I was trying to work. I was agitated, and my interest in doing things seemed to have gone somewhere without leaving a forwarding address. Getting out of bed could feel like a negotiation I didn’t have much energy for.
Taken one at a time, those things were frustrating enough. Together, they changed the feel of the day. I could know there were things to do and still struggle to get myself moving toward them. I could have a thought and then lose part of it while trying to say it. Meanwhile, I was aware of myself being less patient, which did very little to improve my patience.
Then there was the calendar. The month before my next infusion.
“Crap gap” was the phrase I was using for it. It has the advantage of sounding about as pleasant as the experience felt. I was noticing changes as the next treatment approached, trying to understand the pattern and wondering how much of what I felt was physical, how much was psychological, and whether I could even separate those things neatly.
When I brought it up, my doctor seemed unfamiliar with the term. That left me trying to explain the experience behind the phrase. The words were convenient shorthand, but what I needed to communicate was how much harder ordinary things had become.
It’s uncomfortable to wonder whether something is psychological when you’re already having a difficult time. I can turn that question into another reason to be hard on myself. Am I anticipating it? Am I paying more attention because I know the date is getting closer? I don’t have an answer that ties it all up. I have what I was feeling and when I was feeling it.
And I have the small phrase I kept coming back to. A week and a half. Almost there. There was something useful about having a date I could point toward, even though a date couldn’t promise exactly how I would feel afterward.
I wanted to feel more like myself. To get up without quite so much resistance. To finish a thought without having to go back and find what had dropped out of it. To have a little more patience available for the people around me, including me.
What I keep thinking about is how much effort was going into things that didn’t look like much from the outside. On those days, an ordinary day was already taking quite a lot.