Well, my first day of work is done and while I feel like I’m way more tired than I should be from what felt like a relatively light day of work (compared to two weeks ago, I barely did anything), I’m not feeling as completely exhausted as I used to. I’ve actually recovered a bit from how tired I was when I finished the moderate labor portion of my day, which is the first time that has happened in months. Maybe more than half a year. That was the worst part of the medication I was on. Because my physical recovery period was so long, any tiring work meant that I’d still feel tired from it for at least a week. Now, today, I’m already feeling like I might be up for the household labor I’d planned for my evening back when I was feeling ambitious yesterday. I mean, it’s only folding laundry and maybe unloading the dishwasher, but I remember a time not that long ago when even those labors were beyond me on all but my best days after work. It’s good to finally be feeling better, even if now I have to keep pumping the brakes to make sure I don’t wind up pushing myself too hard during my continued recovery period. I have to make sure I pace myself and work out patterns and habits I can maintain over the next two incredibly demanding months. So, to that end, my plan for the rest of this week (last week, as you’re reading this) is to get back into the swing of things at work, stepping up my effort every day a little bit at a time. Then, next week, I’ll be doing that and trying to get in my morning workouts again. Or my evening physical therapy workouts, whichever the day demands. And then after that… Well, maybe I’ll go about trying to fix my sleep schedule. Who knows. If I can get the first two things down, I feel like anything will be within my grasp.

Sometimes it feels too good to be true, to be feeling this much better less than a month after stopping that medication. It feels like I need to pump the brakes on my expectations since I had periods over the last year where I felt like I was improving only for things to immediately get worse again, but writing this marks two solid weeks of noticing incremental improvements so I think I can afford to feel a little hopeful about this. Today, I simply bent over to pick up my discarded pajamas. No forethought, no planning, no careful leveraging of my muscles. I just bent over and picked something up without thinking about it and I can promise you that I was so startled by doing that without a twinge of pain that I almost hurt myself fighting the urge to quickly stand upright again. I haven’t been able to bend over without actively thinking about the process since late November of 2023. I had to kneel at work today, to look at something, and it wasn’t a huge labor to get down onto one knee or to get back up from that position. I was able to just do it. I did a bunch of work today and my muscles and joins aren’t screaming in pain. My hands cramped a little bit, but I was able to keep working through it since it never got very bad and they stopped cramping as my muscles loosened up. I’ve been able to do so much stuff I used to take for granted back in 2023 and I almost want to celebrate just being able to do simple movements like all this stuff again.

In my senior year of college, when I was living in a “single” dorm room without a kitchen (I shared a kitchen with the whole building of mostly freshman who lived in the non-single units on the other floors, but keeping food there meant it usually got stolen by some drunk idiot who’d leave it in the oven while they passed out on the couch until the building got evacuated due to the burning food setting off the fire alarms, which is a thing that happened several times), I dealt with a decent amount of food insecurity. One of the things I just lacked access to at most meals, due to price and storage issues, was fresh fruit and vegetables. Now, between that lack and having a few weeks in that year where I only ate by the grace of my wealthier friends and the guest-passes of the freshman I knew, I will forever be grateful for the ability to not only buy vegetables and fruit whenever I want, but to be able to have enough food on hand that missing a trip to the grocery store for whatever reason means that I’ll be able to still make myself food. It has been twelve years, almost, since that period of my life ended, and that appreciation hasn’t diminished in any way. I still feel bad when vegetables go bad in my fridge and even still enjoy biting into any number of vegetables just to enjoy the crisp taste of fresh produce. As my body recovers from this year of pain, fatigue, and lessened physical capability, I wonder if I’ll still feel this grateful over the simple act of being able to walk down a staircase without needing to take careful steps out of the fear that my knees won’t support me or that the uneven placement of my feet might cause my back to twinge in a way that sends me tumbling down the stairs (a thing I came close to doing over a dozen times last year before I figured out how to go down the stairs without this additional risk). It’s amazing how nice the simple things in life can be when you’ve been without them. Hell, even just being relatively pain free right now feels like a marvel every time I tune back into my body.

I hope this lasts. I hope I continue to improve. I hope that all the work I’ve put into taking care of my body over the last five years pays off. I hope that, eventually, once my body is finished processing the medication I took for thirteen and a half months, I can truly feel like myself again (usual baggage included). I hope that my decision to take this medication in the first place pays off. I hope that I can still feel this grateful a week from now, when this blog post goes up and I’ve spent an entire week placing increasingly difficult physical demands on myself in order to do my job. I’ll admit that I feel a little scared, letting myself feel this hope, because it hasn’t worked out for me a single time in the last five years, but I’m hopeful that this one thing will work out at least a little better than it did a month ago. It might not be perfect, I am absolutely not fully recovered yet, but I do genuinely believe, for the first time in almost a year, that I will eventually feel better. Believe it deep in my gut rather than just my head. Which is almost as strange and unfamiliar a sensation as sitting at my keyboard, typing away, without my fingers starting to ache halfway through a blog post such that I am forced to take a fifteen minute break to let them rest before being able to finish.