Lost my Way

 I’ve been sitting on this post for a week now.  Just wasn’t ready to share it but after our boot camp, I am ready!  

My Kung Fu journey comes with personal struggles.  Whose doesn’t?  For me it’s my medical health.  I do not mean the shoulder or the knee injuries that I am dealing with.  It is the Polycythemia Vera (a bone marrow disease that is treated with a chemo drug that put me on the immune compromised list). It is the Crohn’s disease that resulted in GI surgery that took some of my small intestine, and Thyroid Cancer that was treated with surgery and radioactive iodine.  This year had health issues again rising to the forefront.  Earlier in the year, my bloodwork was showing a change which is the sign that the PV is metastasizing. Luckily it was just a response to an infection and my health team is comfortable where everything is at.  Then last week I got my results from a skin biopsy on my nose and found out that I have micronodular basal cell cancer (a type of skin cancer).  So Nov 1 I will be going to the dermatology clinic to have a MOHs procedure where they cut away layer by layer until they get all the cancer removed.  

I am pretty positive about these things and work hard to have a positive attitude.  I have a plan, I have an action, I move forward.  I need to be positive, it is my coping mechanism.  But can positivity be bad?  I am realizing that I am using positivity as a way to downplay what is happening.  I am not allowing myself to fully appreciate the feelings and concerns that arise. I am not ignoring things, I have a plan and an action and in my mind I think there is nothing to worry about.  It's minor in the big picture of things that could go wrong but this thinking is where positivity can be bad.  It does not allow for the feelings of myself or others to be accepted, to be validated.  That is wrong!  If we don't acknowledge them and process them then it is as bad as ignoring them.  I may shut the door to my families feelings by being so positive, I even shut the door to my feelings.

This new challenge did cause a bit of panic and I see it in my training.  My normal routine went out the window and I started to change my training even though it has been working so well in the past. Thoughts on how can I progress faster because I "think" my recovery outage will be a week but I won't know until the time comes.  My journaling also went out the window, both in my numbers and in the quality of my journaling.   I haven't been sleeping well and I've been throwing PVCs (extra heart beats - I do that when stressed) so there is still more going on in that little brain of mine. My brain and my body are out of sync so I need to figure out how to bring them back.  It might be remnants of the busy week with the upgrade but I don’t think that’s the root cause.  I need to dig deeper and make sure.  I am so looking forward to the meditation portion of boot camp!  For now I am returning back to journaling my numbers, back to forms, back to what I was doing before.