Thursday, December 21, 2006

More cleaning

We finished cleaning the house today. Ian did all the vacuuming and I did the bathrooms. The two jobs took almost the same amount of time, but then Ian does a better job vacuuming than I do :) Cleaning was exhausting. I found that the pain in my sternum flared up quite a lot while I was doing the cleaning. Each time it did, I had to stop and wait a bit for the pain to subside. This bothers me, because it means that the pain interferes with what would normally be a household task. Just because I don't do it often enough doesn't mean that it isn't a normal household task :)

I don't like that I'm not really able to do stuff. Even if I up my painkiller usage (which I need to anyways), it's not like I can really train to make the pain go away. This isn't like muscle weakness, where if I just work it enough it'll get strong enough to do the job without flaring up in pain. The pain won't go away unless the tumours in my sternum and elsewhere go away (or I get them irradiated, which isn't an option for my sternum). A workaround for the cleaning problem will be to do the cleaning in very small steps. So instead of doing the entire bathroom in one day, I'll have to do the sink one day, and the tub the next (or the day after, or whatever), and so on. If I'd had that kind of time before we left, I'd have done that.

This thing where I can't do everything I want to sucks. It makes me feel older than I am, and more of an invalid than I want to think that I am. Sigh. I know I'll adjust eventually.... but it sure sucks in the meantime.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is another option - hire someone to come in to do those jobs that trigger the pain. Then you could feel decandent instead debilitated :)
Love, Mom

Anonymous said...

i actually had the same advice as above. i know money must not be accumulating in heaps and piles all about the house right now, but it may be a good idea for those times that you are in a hurry or in lots of pain. live the dream of decadence!
love,
vicki

Chantelle said...

I'd love to hire cleaning people, but Ian doesn't believe in it. He says that he'll clean the house every once in a while, and that I won't need to clean.

Good luck in convincing Ian that we need to hire cleaning people :)

Love,
Chantelle