Vorlon Whispers

Thoughts on Upcoming Treatments

Tomorrow will be a little busy. At 08:00, I need to be down to the New Jersey Health Care System for my first radiation treatment. Then I need to be back at the oncologist for my chemo treatment at 09:15.

After that, it’s just a matter of sitting back in their easy chair while they drip their chemicals through my veins.

I’ve had some people offer their sympathy for my upcoming treatment. While I appreciate the thoughts, let me just say this.

If this treatment will move me forward, I say bring it on. Yes, it knocks me down a bit and I feel pretty tired for a period of time. However, I’m not about to turn back now. Shoot. If I had to, I could do this standing on my head.

I think this feeling comes a bit, from when I used to run competitively several years ago. I used to rate myself as an A- minus runner. When I was in good racing shape, I would place in the top 90 percent of all the runners. Mind you, we had no world-class runners in the group. I used to run 5 km, 5 mile, 10 km, 10 mile, and half marathon races.

Foot racing teaches one how to suffer. There are long miles on the road by yourself building your aerobic capacity. Then you get down to speed training where you try to build your leg speed for future races.

The trick is to train hard, but not so hard, you cannot go out and perform on weekends.

The real deal comes when the gun goes off at the start of the race. I had to figure how how fast I figured I could run the race. The best strategy is to run the race so that every mile is exactly the same speed. By the same token, you want to expend your energy is such a way that you collapse just past the finish line.

At the beginning of a race one has a lot of adrenalin and it is easy to go out like a bat out of h*** and then crash and burn. I had rather a good sense of pace and could start out slow enough that I would have quite a bit fuel left at the half way point.

The second half of the race is the hardest part. One attempts to speed up. You don’t really speed up, but by attempting to, you have a better chance of maintaining your speed.

Aside from feeling like you’re not getting enough oxygen, your whole body starts to hurt. However, one must re-interpret the pain. It’s not really pain. Its how you body feels when is performing flat-out.

And this takes all the mental concentration you can bring to the table. Your whole concentration turns inward and you monitor your body piece by piece. If there are no potentially, nagging pains that could be incipient injuries then you just concentrate on maintaining your pace. If your mind wanders for even a bit, you will find yourself falling off the pace.

I think that mental “toughness”, if you will, has helped me in my treatments. I’ve been tired before. I’ve been in a lot of pain before. All is only flesh. The real part is the inner part – the mental part. That’s where you dig down and bury yourself. Now, protected from all the fleshly concerns, you concentrate on steering the ship and making sure things get done that need to be done.

There is always pain and fatigue in life. But if you give in to them, you are lost. I guess that is relatively easy for me to say, as I have so far not experienced any excruciating pain.

I don’t know if this all makes any sense or not. It’s sort of stream of thought. I should probably save this and rewrite it, but I don’t have that kind of patience.

Posted by The Vorlon at March 6, 2006 9:39 PM