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.