Normal is as Normal Does 

It’s been 12 days since the first chemo session and I am back to feeling like myself. Days 1-6 were unpleasant* but since then I have steadily been feeling better and more like normal Arielle. I go back for the next round of chemo next Thursday (June 2) but until then I am doing my best to enjoy the good feelings and the hair on my head (don’t be fooled, I won’t actually do anything to enjoy my hair, maybe I should give it an old school V05 Hot Oil treatment as a parting gift).

Although I feel more and more like normal Arielle between treatments I am also realizing that normal life means something different today than it did less than 3 months ago. Normal things then included:

• Wearing a bra
• Going to work everyday
• Planning our wedding
• Working out a bunch of days a week
• Getting ready for ball season
• Complaining about my boobs

Today’s normal includes:

• Only wearing a sports bra if my weird chicken cutlets are going to poke out the arm holes of a tank top
• Thinking about work, visiting work, texting people from work but not actually working.
• Re-resolving to lose weight for our postponed 2017 wedding
• Figuring out what my body can and can’t do at the gym 8 weeks post surgery and during chemo (when not feeling like I am going to retch on other gym-goers)
• Pacing up and down the sidelines watching my team play ball
• Complaining about the area under my boobs that I couldn’t really see before.
• Chemo treatments and doctors appointments
• Nausea
• Buying and eating Gravol like Pez.

I lived the “before normal” for so long and now I look back and some days it seems like that was ages ago, other days it feels like yesterday. I was upset for our life to flip upside down and for my normal to suddenly be something I didn’t recognize, but at the end of the day, normal is fluid. All of this stuff right now is hard, messy and some days it’s super shittykaka but I also know it’s temporary and a year from now our normal will look a little more normal.

*Unpleasant = day 1 throwing up, 24-7 nausea, the inability to focus for long periods of time and enough acid reflux to make me wonder if I am actually a 70 year old Italian man that can’t handle the spicy sausage anymore.