(not necessarily in that order)
A rather different day than yesterday.
I had a very early meeting, which threw off the new routine I just established, and left my energies feeling rather scattered.
Sitting in the sun and gazing at the autumn leaves ended up being the high point of the day.
Yesterday was the first Tuesday since February 8 that we didn’t visit the Infusion Center for my chemotherapy injection.
It took me until the evening to realize that the discontinuance of the routine had me feeling a little “off”.
It would be too much to say that I miss getting blood drawn and drugs injected every single week, but we did get to know and appreciate so many lovely people over the many months — at the check-in desk, in the oncology and radiation departments, and especially in the infusion center, where I spent from two to three hours every single Tuesday.
So, I’m kind of missing the people, and it’s definitely an adjustment.
Of course, just as we were congratulating ourselves on doing a lot less driving, we realized that we’re about to start weekly trips to Sacramento in preparation for the bone marrow transplant.
More adjustments!
And it’s kicking my behind!
It definitely was not a good idea to drop the ball on my weekly fasting routine, because getting back in the flow of it is so hard.
Sure I had good reasons for taking a week off (or two…or three), but in retrospect I can see those reasons really weren’t good enough.
So, here I am, after four (or is it five?) weeks of no fasting, celebrating that the day is almost over and I didn’t break down and eat. 😄
So, I took a bit of a break from my healthy eating program for a while.
I chose not to write about it as it was happening. Basically, I was feeling the truth of “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
But now I’m close to finishing my first weekly fast in almost a month, grateful that it hasn’t been any harder than usual (phew!), and feeling ready to look at what happened.
Some of it was due to the (not unusual) “perfect storm” of stress, emotional eating, and going on vacation. But I realize another factor is that I got a little bored with my eating routine.
And that’s due not so much to having lots of restrictions, but rather to the fact that I don’t really want to be bothered with creative cooking. I mean, other people in my program post these awesome photos of delicious, tasty meals which I would gladly eat — if they just happened to magically appear on my table!
I think it’s a lingering side effect of my decades as a freelance musician in San Francisco.
My “at home” eating habits back then were pretty darn boring and routine (I could eat pasta and broccoli 4-5 times a week for months on end), but that was balanced by the fact that I ate out a great deal of the time.
Chinese food, taquerias, coffee houses, favorite breakfast spots…these and so much more were a huge part of what made living in San Francisco so fun. Then there was the fact that I was frequently eating on the way to gigs or at gigs.
There’s definitely not that kind of constant interest and variety around food in my life now, which is fine! I’m not really a “foodie” and I truly don’t want to go back to eating out constantly.
But I’m also not going to sweat the fact that, after seven months of being amazingly consistent, I felt the urge to cut loose for a time.
We’re wrapping up our staycation and preparing for reentry.
I’ve never really thought about it before, but ending a vacation and preparing to get back into your regular routine is like merging onto a freeway: ready or not, you have to increase your speed in order to slip right into the flow of traffic.
Which will be us tomorrow morning, jumping right back into singing for Sunday service. 😜