Six Stairs

There are moments when being sick feels dramatic. There are oncologists, unfamiliar drug names, hospital appointments and conversations where somebody calmly discusses things you would rather not have happening inside your body.

Then there are moments like this.

Laundry.

That may be the part of cancer and treatment I was least prepared for. Not the big things, strangely enough. Everybody understands that cancer brings big things. What I did not understand was how illness could quietly change the scale of ordinary life.

Six Stairs Used to Be Nothing

I would not have noticed those stairs before. That is the strange part. They were not exercise. They were not something I would have counted. I would have gone down, done whatever I needed to do, come back up and immediately moved on to the next thing without my brain bothering to record the event.

Now my body records it for me.

By the time I reached the top I was breathing hard enough that I had to stand there and recover. There is something particularly irritating about being exhausted by something your mind still classifies as trivial. My brain remembers perfectly well that six stairs are nothing. Apparently nobody sent that memo to the rest of me.

The Mathematics of an Ordinary Day

Once your energy becomes unreliable, you start doing calculations you never used to make.

If I go downstairs now, am I going to have enough energy to come back up? If I shower before I go out, have I just spent part of whatever energy I had available for leaving the house? If I walk through a store, how far is the parking lot when I come back out? If I do something today, am I going to spend tomorrow recovering from it?

None of these are particularly interesting questions, which is exactly the problem. Nobody dreams about having enough stamina to complete their laundry. There is no inspirational music playing while I stand beside a washing machine wondering whether I should sit down for a minute.

This is simply what illness does sometimes. It turns boring things into logistical problems.

I Still Think I Can Do What I Used to Do

That is probably going to take a while to unlearn.

Somewhere in my head I still have the physical expectations of the person I was before this stage of cancer. I decide to do something based on what should be easy, and then my body introduces itself to the conversation.

It is not always dramatic enough to stop me from doing something altogether. Sometimes it just makes everything slower. I stop halfway. I lean against something. I sit down. I wait for the light-headedness or breathlessness to settle and then continue.

There is a strange indignity in needing recovery time from household chores. I know that probably sounds ridiculous, but I miss the invisibility of them. I miss being able to do something boring without having to think about my health while I do it.

I do not miss climbing mountains. I miss being able to do laundry without it becoming a medical update.

This Is Why “How Are You?” Is Such a Complicated Question

Some days nothing obviously terrible has happened. I have not been rushed to hospital. Nobody has delivered catastrophic news. I may even look reasonably normal if you see me sitting down.

But there can be a very large distance between “nothing catastrophic happened today” and “I feel well.”

I can be technically okay and still be exhausted. I can be sitting quietly while my heart feels as though it has just finished a brisk walk without consulting me. I can have enough energy to talk to somebody and not enough energy to go downstairs twice.

Illness has introduced an absurd number of shades between sick and well.

I Am Learning to Stop Arguing With My Body

I am not particularly good at this yet.

There is a part of me that still wants to treat fatigue as something I can out-stubborn. I want to finish what I started because stopping feels too much like surrendering ground. I want to believe that if something was easy before, it should still be easy now.

Unfortunately, cancer does not appear especially interested in my opinion on the matter.

So I am learning, reluctantly, that stopping is sometimes just stopping. Sitting down is sometimes just sitting down. Using a cane does not need to become a referendum on independence. Taking longer to do something does not mean I have failed at doing it.

I am not particularly interested in turning any of that into a life lesson. I would still prefer to have my old energy back.

But until that happens, pretending the limits are not there will not make the stairs any shorter.