Hanging my Hopes on: Breath

Today I’m hanging my hopes on my air. Trusting that one breath will come after another. Closing my eyes and hoping that all the drugs working to keep my heart beating at an appropriate speed will work. Trusting that I’ve got the best possible team around me whose goals are in line with mine. To just keep me breathing.

For a year and a half I got through the day by knowing that no matter what they threw at me I could survive because my heart was strong, it hadn’t yet taken a beating. Brain cancer doesn’t effect your heart or lungs. I could go to my happy place every day and spend hours on the river rowing because the best feeling in the world was stoping after a 4-minute high rate piece and taking a full deep breath. Now its in my lungs, and my heart hurts, and I’ve spent the last 8 months going to every single practice and standing on the dock or sitting in the coach boat. I don’t have a crew anymore, half of my identity as a rower is gone.

But today, to get through the day today I’m going to hang my hopes on the idea that eventually breathing will be easier. That I’ll get to be me again and that this is not the new normal. This is not how I’m going to live until I die. This is not it.

Insomnia

Sleep shouldn’t be this hard. There’s no reason for it to hurt this much or be this painful. In closing my eyes I panic, my heart races out of control, and my thoughts spiral down to a place I hate going.

Every night I delay closing my eyes as long as possible. I go to my park on 25th and sit for a while. Sometimes thats just the start. I collect my thoughts and then walk. Sometimes thats the end destination. I can stay there until the clouds start to lighten and until all of a sudden closing my eyes isn’t so hard, isn’t so scary.

Tonight I came home from my park early. I start this instead. I bring my computer over to my desk and I panic. I cant think straight and I cant breath right because I start thinking about “what if I cant do this?”, “what if I cant beat this”. I cant deal with the emptiness of night – how am I going to deal with the monotony of a coffin and the nothingness of that?

I think I’m scared of that…