Choices

The radiation side effects are finally subsiding –5 weeks after the treatment program.  I’m unclear about this fatigue, strong headaches and muscle pain that are ever-present.  Is it from the initial chemos, the current one or the radiation? I wonder with no ramification as to what I’d do with an answer if there is one.  

The doctors are now recommending that I start taking these hormone modulator pills – the final step that will last for the next 5 years.  We picked up the first bottle last week from the BC Cancer pharmacy, but I’ve been sitting on it, not yet ready to begin.  With some of the side effects from the previous treatments still hanging on, I’m hesitant to aggravate my already bruised body.  Another choice!  

Do you regret the choices you made in your life? Or are you one of those who say “I don’t regret my choices because I don’t dwell on/in the past?”  Whenever I hear someone say that, I hear hesitation, “I’m afraid that I’d regret it, therefore I don’t dare to look back.” 

How about your career choice? How would the other path have been different from the path you took instead? Does one path guarantee a more fulfilling life than the other?  The likelihood is that either path and possibly even a third or fourth path could have given us different life experiences and happiness. A musician who decided to take on a PR career would find fulfillment in different ways than another musician would. As a successful versus struggling musician would have afforded very different lifestyle choices, maybe a PR career would have ensured a specific lifestyle including music as a hobby and other fun/life expansions like travelling. Which path would allow us to live our lifestyle vision more fully and better aligned with who we are?  

Back to my choice at present:   I chose not to start my new medication just yet, although I will one day – another choice.  

Then the night before, I ended up at Emergency at our local hospital with a high fever. Being a cancer patient, my fevers aren’t taken lightly. It can spell all sorts of scary possibilities.  So the emergency nurses are busy with X-raying my body, collecting urine samples and extracting huge vials of my blood for culturing…

Lying on the hospital bed with Håkan’s gigantic winter coat over me as I’m shivering under the homogenous white ceiling with harsh fluorescent light, I mutter to myself, “Thank God, we didn’t pile on the hormone modulators. We would’ve thought that it was the new medicine that caused havoc.”  

At an ungodly hour, I was sent home with most of the scary possibilities ruled out except for one – a blood infection. Blood culture takes 2-3 days to determine. My temperatures have gone up and down in big swings since. I learned (or maybe re-learned) one thing about myself: I’m really not very good at being sick.  

Back to your choice, what choice can you make today to make your life more fulfilling? What other choices will you need to make to that end? If you don’t choose, another force, something else or someone else will choose for you.