swimming with, and without, my cancer
I decided to go for a swim yesterday, but I didn’t because my back and hamstrings were all so tight…I postponed. I got up today and was still so darned tight, all the way from my thoracic spine down to my knees. I did about an hour of yoga with “Baron Baptiste” on Netflix (the Long and Lean Yoga…I love it) and felt great and stretched out afterward.
Later I went to the pool and had a swim. I haven’t been in the water since…sheesh, I can’t even remember…must be that time I went swimming that morning after work at the pool in South City. That was all BC, Before Cancer.
I was sad to find out just how rusty I am. My stroke seems stiff and awkward. Part of that is that they cut into my armpit to do the axillary lymph node dissection, and it still hurts. I’ve lost the ability to lay on the ground with my fingers interlaced behind my head. My right arm can rest on the ground, but my left arm hangs in the air, suspended by tight muscles, elbow hovering about 4” from the ground.
So, I’m as stiff as a cadaver, my breathing is clumsy, there’s no strength in my pull, my stroke yeilds no power and there’s no glide…in short—I now swim like an old lady.
I thought “you’ll get it back, just swim, loosen up, it will come back to you.” Usually, you swim more efficiently the more tired you get. Sure enough, at around 40 minutes, my stroke was a little more graceful, but I wasn’t swimming with any more power.
I guess I like swimming because it’s very solitary…it’s not like jogging or anything else, really. There are no distractions—your focus is inward, like meditating. When I was in architecture school, I worked out my design issues while doing laps (I used to do 1.5 to 2 miles per day back then…sigh) and when I was in nursing school, I would work out the stuff from the petty bickering stuff going on in my clinical group. Today, I was surprised to find cancer there in the pool with me.
It hit me from the side, like a great white. “The last time I was in this pool, I had cancer…cancer was…HERE…with me.”
Having cancer is like having (I imagine) a parasite, like a tapeworm, or some other thing feeding off your metabolic processes. It’s a pirate, it hijacks your cellular functions to make whatever IT needs. I marvelled that I had felt so good, yet had had cancer then. How could I have felt so good and had something like cancer hijacking me? Then of course, your mind says “do I have cancer now and I just don’t know it? Can it be?”
So, it was, yet was not, in the pool with me today.
I didn’t swim my normal 1.5-2 miles, sadly. I think I swam over a half mile, but not by much, and it wore me out.
And now, I’m so hungry—that special “after swim” hunger that you feel on a cellular level, not like an empty stomach. Metabolically, your body is crying out for replacement of what you spent. All I can think about is how this feels like a few days after the chemo, the hunger that sets in from the steroids they pump you full of during your infusion.
I can’t even enjoy swimming anymore without reliving these experiences, damnit.
