Making Progress

I survived the day, and it didn't go nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

The thing that I was actually dreading the most was having colleagues trickle in and ask how I was doing. Only my two closest friends and the director knew that I had surgery; the rest of my colleagues knew that I was ill. However, having been out of the office for three weeks, they must have assumed it was something major (or that I was just ditching work!). Anyway. I had a few that asked if I was ok and then lingered ... I knew they wanted details, but I didn't offer any. I just nodded my head and smiled and said I'm ok, each day gets better. Nobody pressed much further. I'm glad that's over!

Class itself was ok. I teach in an adjacent building -- I don't know if it was smart or not, but I decided to take the stairs instead of the elevator. I couldn't bring myself to take the lift just to go up one floor. At the top of the stairs I ran into one of my students who decided to walk with me to class. Now one of the things the students tease me about is that I walk really fast. Whenever they walk with me, they always comment on how fast I walk ... however, today was a different story. We were chitchatting while walking towards class, but I could tell that the student didn't know what to do - should she continue to walk at my snail's pace or pull ahead? Eventually as we got to the second hallway, she went on to the classroom. What a relief - because I knew I was walking a bit faster than I was comfortable!

Class was fine. I stayed back at the office to catch up with some grading. I should have gone home immediately, but I wanted to buy a few groceries. So I stopped at the nearby supermarket ... I had told myself to leave everything that didn't need to be put in the fridge immediately in my car so that D could bring it up later ... but as seems to have been the trend today, I decided to carry them all up (the bags weren't too heavy).

Once I made it home, the exhaustion set in. I had already been feeling nauseous from the drive, and all the movement didn't help. By the time I put the groceries away and tidied up a bit I was completely knackered, and to make things worse, I got my period. That was definitely the worst part of my day. The cramps were killing me!! It was hard not to take a whole bottle of painkillers to get rid of the pain ... while I managed for the most part to firmly push out any bitter thoughts about how it wasn't supposed to be this way anymore, a few moments of pure frustration did creep in ...

Anyway.

Overall, here's what I DID manage to do today:

- drive

- climb stairs

- do groceries (and carry them up and put them away)

That's a lot of movement compared barely anything over the past three weeks. No gym yet, but I'm working up to it!