PROGRESS: Day 2.2

I’m successfully into Week 2!

Physical feelings

Today was a good day. I got another wonderful night sleep (thank you Benadryl!) with a super-low resting heart rate of 47 and rock-bottom stress levels. I woke up and completed a 19-mile ride with Sean on the trail, which was wonderful! I decided I wanted to push a little bit harder this time because I was feeling good, but I don’t think I overdid it. Maybe it’s from the treatment or lack of fitness or riding fasted, but I didn’t have any explosive energy. We have a big hill from our house up to the trail and I did it 1 minute, 5 seconds slower than my PR. Not that I was trying to beat my PR, but that was just me plugging away up the hill. I could tell my legs didn’t have it to push much harder.

From my experience last week, I knew I needed to take a Pepcid to help combat all the gross burps I experienced last week. I think the dexamethasone causes some stomach/gastrointestinal symptoms, which is why I end up with the gross burps that make me not feel quite nauseous, but I don’t feel good either. I can tell as I get closer to the end of the day that the Benadryl has worn off and I’m dealing with the burn off of the rest of the dexamethasone. I’m going to attempt to hit an earlier bed time to give my body more of a chance to calm down and rest so I can get a better night’s sleep than last week.

Other than all of that, I just had a long day of remote work. I had a training that I needed to do, so I sat at my computer for 8 hours. Not too physically taxing, but definitely a bit boring. At the end of my training, Sean had picked up Indian food for dinner and Maddie came running in telling me, “Mommy! It’s dinner time! Let’s go!”

Emotional feelings

I’m feeling a sense of accomplishment making it through another round of treatment. Also, a great nights’ sleep helps to put me in good spirits. I was anticipating that today would be a good day, because it was last week. I’m also mentally preparing myself that tomorrow is going to be a hard day. I will finish coming down off of the Dexamethasone and I might feel the most of the fatigue and discomfort from the Taxol. I’m hoping that if I can get a better rest tonight that I won’t feel physically and emotionally as badly as last week. But I also know this treatment will involve ups and downs and I just need to take it day by day. When you feel crappy it’s hard not to feel like it’s always going to be crappy though. But I can’t complain – today was a good day!