Slowly but surely, progress is being made. I still have bad days where I have physical limitations such as exhaustion, headaches, hot flashes and lack of sleep. I am still bald as a bat (are bats really bald?), and dripping fluid from my eyes and nose (cute!), and I’m either still swollen or chubby (let’s go with swollen).

The great news is that I am able to bounce back from these restrictions much more gracefully than I was even 2 weeks ago. I am young and strong, both of body and will, and have found that my bad days are often followed by good days.

I still sleep terribly at night, which is the pits as I adore sleeping, but until these clunker temporary breasticles come out on October 26 and are replaced by gooey implants, I am relegated to ‘sleeping’ only on my back or quasi on my side. There is no upside to this, but I have found that as of late, I am not feeling the need to nap daily. The want- yes, duh. The need, no.

Take for example yesterday. I felt okay in the morning, but after lunch I felt rough. Granted, I had Mexican food that probably heavily contributed to the cyclone of digestional upheaval, but cancer was definitely still involved in the aftermath. I was bed-ridden for the entire second half of the day. I had zero energy, my entire body felt like an oven, and my insides were in a bad way.

I woke up this morning and before I even opened my eyes I said a silent prayer that I wouldn’t still feel crappy. And lo and behold, I did feel better! A couple of weeks ago this one bad day would have set me back quite a bit. Now I seem to be back on a non-cancer person’s schedule as it pertains to recovery from acute illness.  This really is a thrilling development.

Yesterday I barely moved from 2pm on, and today, I took 2 kids to a pumpkin festival, Trader Joes, Costco and on a bike ride, pulling them in the trailer. That is a giant improvement. That kind of rebound would have been unimaginable even a few weeks ago.

So the moral of the story is that progress is possible and is happening.  It is very hard for me to reconcile the fact that I am almost done with all immediate treatment and will be a ‘graduate’ of acute cancer care.

I am technically considered cancer-free at this point. As amazing as this is, it is a wildly distant concept from the way I feel and appear. I couldn’t look more cancery between the baldness and general blobbiness, but I don’t have cancer anymore. How do I reconcile not having cancer, but looking like I do? If you have the answer, please let me know.

In the meantime, I am very pleased with the fact that I have been able to turn a craptastic weekend into a sunny, lovely, vital weekend.

My, how times have changed.