Downhill...

Today is one of the bad days. Today, more so than other days, I'm reminded that I'm now disabled. I didn't sleep well, due to a migraine trying to creep into my head. Not to mention I stayed up later than I should have because I got caught up in watching Stephen King's Misery, something I never should have watched right before bed, after having recently published three books!

It's been cloudy and rainy for three or four days now, but today in the early afternoon, we had serious storms roll through. Bad enough that we were issued a tornado warning. We don't have a basement, so the best shelter we can hope for, beyond the brick walls of the house, is a single closet in my youngest daughter's room that has only one outside wall but is rather large due to its unusual shape. I think they took the furnace closet and combined it with the smaller bedroom closet. Anyway, if need be, it might still be difficult to get five people and three dogs into it!

Athena, my horse, seems to have a sixth sense when it comes to really bad weather, and she stayed in her stall mostall day. We've learned to watch her when weather might turn bad. In a light rain, especially when it's been a hot day, she doesn't mind getting wet. But even if she does stay outside in the rain, she always turns her butt to the direction it's coming from!

This kind of weather, I've noticed, seems to play havoc with my body after my chemo treatments. Just like a long-healed broken bone, the change in temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure causes all the scar tissue left in my body to scream in pain.
 Chemotherapy drugs are very toxic to body cells. It's designed to kill rapidly-growing cells like cancerous tumor cells. But there's no way to 'program' the chemo to ONLY attack the bad cells. So it also attacks the cells in the mouth, the intestines, the skin, and the hair, among others. And some chemo causes intense pain, which is the body's signal of tissue damage. So how can they know that the treatment really isn't causing any lasting damage? Long-term side effects of chemo are harder to research, as I've found out myself in trying to learn more about chemo and its effects.

Days like today remind me that I may never be able to rejoin the "normal" workforce. After all, it's a rare boss who would accept "sorry I can't come to work today because it's raining." Being my own boss is proving to be more difficult than simply showing up to work. But I'm going to give it my best shot!