Finding Balance

Fair warning, it’s been little while since I last wrote so this is bound to be a long one. If you are curious where my thoughts are these days, read on. If you want just the update and want to skip the rest, I understand. The short version is, I’m doing fine. Fatigue has been an increasingly difficult battle, but I’m continuing in the fight. My blood work has been trending in the wrong direction, meaning my numbers are either going lower or higher depending on the part you are looking at, but not where we want them to be. That said, they are still in acceptable ranges, so it’s stay the course in terms of treatment. And while numbers are not going in the direction I want, I’m still doing very well considering the heavy treatment I’m under. My diet and fitness efforts are paying huge dividends in that respect. I’m still and honestly a bit vain about sitting there in the chair getting my blood drawn and the vitals showing my heart rate at a fit 51 bpm. I’m continuing to reform my physique and my weight is holding steady at a great place. Yeah, take that cancer.

So about that balance

Most of the times in life when I feel like I’m doing my best, feeling the happiest, is when I am truly in balance. Harmony between all the things I need to do and want to do. Sometimes to achieve that balance we all need to make extra efforts in one direction to counteract too much effort or lack of effort in another direction, eventually landing back in that point of equalization with things just feel…right. For some time before getting myself back into an active lifestyle and a result in better overall health I had let my physical state swing imbalance to a point where not only did I feel unhealthy and experiencing chronic pain, but it was bleeding into all aspects of my life. Looking back I can see how my attitude, mental and emotional health suffered as a result. Frankly at times I was depressed and continuing in a downward spiral. Not only is this state simply crappy all around, it’s self fulfilling. You don’t feel like doing the things you should, so you keep falling further into an unhappy and unhealthy state.

In some of my recent readings it is also suggested that being in that state of imbalance can be a significant contributing factor to the source of developing cancer. Not sure I fully buy into that theory of cancer being a healing reaction the body develops in reaction to this serious imbalance, but I can definitely see how serious stress, depression and other factors can impede your natural immune response capacity causing a wide variety of possible side effects within the body.

Every Day I Fight

Recently I’ve been reading and just completed the book by Stuart Scott titled “Every Day I Fight” after having it recommended to me by a friend. He said Scott’s positive attitude and fighting spirit reminded him of me and my desire in saying I Choose To Live ever since my diagnosis. I’m not so sure of that assessment, but I appreciated the correlation and immediately interested in reading the book. I remembered and always admired Stuart Scott on ESPN (can I get a BOOYAH?!) and knew of his cancer battle. I found the audiobook on Overdrive and dove right in.

A good portion of the book is Scott’s memoirs of some important parts of his life that shaped who he was and what led to his career in sports anchoring and broadcast. It was fascinating and important to understanding his attitude when transitioning to a life with cancer. I picked up the ebook as well so I could take some notes and highlight some key portions I found particularly inspiring and insightful. See Scott also mirrors some of what I believe to be important in living with cancer. It’s not just how we fight, but how we live our daily lives with cancer. That while we can be positive and have optimism, we also have some reality that is out of our control that we need to come to terms with that lack of control and just work in areas in which we can. Here’s a few things I thought were particularly insightful.

“Once you’re told you have it, cancer is never not with you.” “But only a month into this fight, I was already experiencing what I’d come to call the Burden. There’s not any time of any day that you forget you have cancer. You never have a moment when you say to yourself, Hey, wow, I forgot I have cancer…That’s exhausting, man. It becomes part of your identity, and it only adds to your fatigue to have the same conversation about it over and over again throughout every day.”

This is absolutely true. There is never a time that I forget I have cancer. It’s always with you, practically ever present in my thoughts. You have those times you are walking own the street or in a group setting where I find myself looking around thinking “Who here has cancer? I bet most of these people don’t. They are just going about their lives without the weight of knowing their time may be much more limited. Do they realize how lucky they are?” Those are not productive thoughts, but they are part of the reality that is the day to day mental struggle of having cancer.

“I would never have that again. That carefree, total immersion in simple moments. From now on, whenever I laughed, it would no longer be an innocent laugh; it would instead be tinged with the bittersweet fear that I had only so many laughs remaining. That now there were finite numbers left to me: a finite number of laughs, of hours spent with the girls, of days.”

This particular part of the exhaustion of talking about it hasn’t really hit me. I’m open about most aspects of my life and don’t mind the discussion. It can get a bit repetitive at times, but that’s also one reason I find it fruitful to share my thoughts online. Plenty have said they appreciate knowing what’s up without having to ask. Plus it really has been rewarding for so many to have messaged or talked with me privately about their own battles and the benefits they’ve received from reading and participating in my journey. Perhaps someday that will change for me, but I hope not.

Scott also was a fighter in his physical side of the battle. He was a lifelong athlete, so it was a natural thing for him to take his battle to the gym. Through many surgeries and prolonged treatments he’d include daily gym time, sparring, weights and P90x as part of his personal regiment.

“I can’t tell you how important it felt to go from the chemo infusion center to the gym. It took about fifteen minutes to get to the gym from the infusion center, but I felt like I was traveling a great distance: from the land of the sick to the land of the recovering. I’d work out three or four times a week, but the most important workout was the one right after chemo. It was like I was proving a point: While you kick my butt, cancer, I’m gonna kick yours.”

“I thought back to the first thought I had when they told me in Pittsburgh: I’m going to die. But I was still here. And here I was, not forty-five minutes out of chemo, and I was in the gym, doing what I do. I started to run. What could be the harm? The disease wasn’t in control. I was.”

Here’s a particular poignant statement on his workouts that resonated with me:

“My workouts were the most important part of my days. I hadn’t done anything since the surgery, and, mentally, I needed to feel strong.” “Mentally, I needed to be in that gym. I’d talk smack to cancer like Ali talked to his opponents. A third set of push-ups? Take that, cancer. Twenty full-out sprint pass patterns? Cancer, you ever run up against this? Some kicks and punches into the middle of the heavy bag after the elliptical? I got yer cancer right here! I needed to do that, not just to show my girls I was fighting for them, but also to show myself I had some control over the situation. ’Cause cancer wants to take control from you. You’ve got to very purposefully stand your ground. That’s what going to the gym is to me. I decide, cancer. That’s what going to work is. I decide, cancer. That’s what traveling all over the country and abroad is. I decide, cancer.”

Man that’s so true with me. Getting up in the morning and cycling, lifting weights or going to a pretty extreme hot yoga session is my medicine. It’s me shouting back to cancer I decide. I’m strong. And while that’s part of it, it’s also me working hard to find and achieve some balance. Cancer and perhaps some of the history that led to my diagnosis are all parts of what has had me out of balance, to the extreme. So I’m making some extreme efforts to get back in balance.

Will this heal me? Frankly I don’t know. Is it part of helping me choose to truly LIVE each day? Absolutely.

If the old ain’t working, then try something new

Part of my journey of getting healthy again was a conscious effort to try new things. If the things I was doing before weren’t working, why keep doing them? In previous attempts to get back on track with fitness would often end after a few weeks of energetic effort due to some injury. So in my new efforts I decided to incorporate some yoga sessions periodically. I had been told many times about the benefits of yoga to stretch out muscles and joints, so I figured why not?

Part of what had kept me from yoga was what I call the “hippy dippy” aspect of the practice. You know, the energy, rooting to the earth, chakra kind of thing. While I knew it was beneficial for many, it kept me away. And while I could joke about that aspect of yoga, I figured the potential benefits were strong enough I’d give it a try. I jumped right in with a class at the local Rec center and one at a Bikram class, otherwise known as a hot yoga. I have to say, after just a few sessions I was hooked.
While right away I saw where I was weak in yoga, I also felt it was accessible and I could proceed at my own pace. In fact every instructor would voice throughout class options for varying levels of capability and emphasize that whatever you can achieve today was just fine. In fact it was better than fine. The fact that you were there at all was an achievement and meant you were making an effort that many others would not. That spoke to me.

Very quickly I saw the benefits. My body alignment improved along with my flexibility and range of motion. The more I would attend class, different phrases and words of encouragement would resonate. I started to ask myself, what I was trying to achieve by being there. Sure I wanted better health, but what specifically what were my goals?

Balance, flexibility, alignment, strength. Being fully present.

This is what I determined I was trying to seek from yoga. This is also what I realized I was trying to achieve in life. Find balance. Being flexible. Be stronger. Be fully present. These phrases were what have become rooted in my daily psyche as I tackle the challenges I’m facing in life right now and in trying to be a better person, husband, and father, etc. As I continue to try and benefit from my various healthy efforts, I’ve tried to take some of the time spent in fitness to let my mind explore these topics further.

Balance

I’ve been surprised at how off balance I’d become. I hate to say it, but some of it is age related, but a lot of it is just being out of practice. It’s also easy to get off balance in life. On the whole we work too much. Work can consume our best hours of the day to the point that when we come home we are simply “done” and everything else gets the lesser part of us. That can be true of health, diet, family, relationships, and more. To achieve balance in life often means making hard choices prioritizing what truly matters and what we just may want or do because it is easier. The magic happens though when we do find balance, when we are happier and things just seem to “work” as they should. As with most things, balance requires constant attention and making it a priority.

Flexibility

Being flexible in health means working your muscles and joints in a way that lets you move further and in a greater range of motion. For me flexibility was and is a goal to avoid injury, and for the most part it has helped me achieve that goal. I’ve still battled some old chronic problems, but they are far better than they have been in the past. In life, being flexible also helps us avoid “injury” that may come from being too rigid when change is required of us. We need to be principled and stick to what truly matters, but also being willing to let unimportant things slide out of our consciousness. I’ve found much more happiness in letting some things just go.

Alignment

For several years I’ve battled almost continual back and neck pain. It’s actually a big part of why my health declined while my weight crept up on me. My lower back, upper back and neck would hurt often, and more so when I’d try to do anything about it. I’d always known one shoulder was higher than the other, but figured that was just the way I was. In the last year I’ve worked hard with yoga and the help of a doctor to improvement my alignment. The doc recognized my issue started with a hip out of socket, which radiated to many of my other back issues. Once in back in place, the relief was nearly instant but not enduring. I needed to strengthen the muscles that had gotten used to the wrong alignment. Yoga has helped this tremendously and my overall back pain is thankfully much improved. Once again thinking of this in terms of life, aligning my efforts with my priorities has brought with it relief. Without a doubt I can get quickly misaligned, but by checking myself frequently and making adjustments I find that the aligned daily efforts relieve a lot of unnecessary pain.

Strength

If there was ever a time in life that I’ve needed strength, this is it. Cancer isn’t a little battle. It’s an all out war that requires constant attention. In that mindset, this is an effort that I have to attend to every day with the Go Beyond attitude. When I announced to the world my diagnosis with “I Choose To Live” it was a battlecry for myself and all those that I love, know, and care about me. I am not just a cancer patient. That is only one part of what my life now includes, but I will beat it. I am determined not just to beat it eventually, but in how I live each day. So on those days when I truly don’t feel like getting out of bed because I’m exhausted, I just do it anyway. Getting up and cycling, doing yoga or lifting weights isn’t just about vanity, it’s about choosing to live. Going to work with bags under my eyes means I will not let treatment fatigue win. I am stronger than that, than all of this.

Being Present

Finally being present. Several yoga instructors have said this many times. They want us to put aside all other thoughts of the world or our upcoming day and just…be. Be in the class, getting the most out of our practice. There’ll be time for the rest of those things later. We get the most out of our efforts in anything when we give it our full attention. All too often we are sold on the concept of multitasking, and our device driven world now has made it worse. We are distracted seemingly consonantly, and never fully present with tasks and people. This out of everything has become a top goal for me. Be present.

So these are some of the things I’ve found from my yoga practice beyond just going and stretching. I’m attempting to stretch my mind along with my muscles and joints. There’s much to be gained in all of it, and I hope to get everything I can from the experience. All summed together I think I’m trying still to achieve balance. Balance in my time, in where I spend my effort, in my health, in my stress, in…everything.