My Greatest Physical Battle and Perseverance

"Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain."

Unknown

"Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did."

Newt Gingrich

One of the main reasons this battle with cancer has been so difficult for me and my family is because of the unexpected challenges we have encountered along the way. One such challenge, which began shortly after my chemo treatments from the fall of 2007, was a physical setback that significantly impaired my quality of life.

Complications related to going through that chemo treatment caused me to have extreme neuropathy in my hands, feet and legs. For those who don't know, this means that I lost most of the feeling and a significant amount of fine motor function in my hands and feet. Neuropathy is a side effect of chemo, but the level of neuropathy I had and the sudden nature in which it all hit me even baffled the doctors. Now, its difficult to describe the feeling of not having any feeling, but I will give some examples of what I had trouble doing to give you a basic idea.

The biggest problem was walking. The nerve damage in my feet was so extreme, I could not walk or even stand without assistance for a month following the chemo. Not having feeling in the feet eliminated my balance, forcing me to use a walker to get around, and even then, I would get tired. I needed help with the most basic of things - just getting from the couch to the dining table, or getting from the couch to the bathroom. My coordination was impaired such that moving without directly staring and concentrating on my feet would result in a loss of balance. While I used to be extremely ticklish in my feet, cringing at the slightest human touch, now I couldn't even feel that human touch. You could have treated my feet like bongo drums and I would have barely noticed.

My hands were no better. The finger coordination was so poor that I had difficulty even holding a pen. I had difficulty holding a spoon or fork to eat, and hot and cold items seemed extremely hot and extremely cold, respectively. My typing ability was significantly impaired; it was so frustrating that for a while, I didn't even bother going on my computer. My hands would often shake and burn, and sometimes they would feel cold and stiff.

Suffice it to say, this was by far the most challenging, humbling and scary experience of my life. My physical limitations made me feel useless, which depressed me. Feeling and coordination is something that I, along with everyone else in this world, takes for granted, and now it was gone. And even when I worked up the motivation to do practice exercises to get the neurons firing again, I would get tired and discouraged, and I quickly gave up and returned to my groove on the couch.

It is very difficult for me to reflect on this period of my life because of how much suffering I went through. My memories of each day back then are vague, partly because I've tried blocking them out for so long. The only reason I think back to it and write about it now is to illustrate just exactly what I have been able to bounce back from thanks to support and perseverance.

I got very mixed opinions from my doctors following that setback. In general, the most common opinion was that the nerve damage would most likely get better over time, but it was unknown if it would get 100% better, or if some neuropathy would linger on forever. Personally, I didn't care about anything the doctors told me at that point, except for one thing: being active and doing practice exercises might help the recovery process.

I made a promise to myself that I wasn't going to remain stagnant and useless one minute more. I no longer wanted to sit on the couch, lamenting about the fact that walking was so difficult, or that writing was so hard. So I sucked it up, firmly planted the dream of a normal life in my brain, and got to work. Each day I began pushing myself harder and harder. Despite the pain and fatigue, I stood up and walked around as much as I could as often as I could. I sat down and wrote, typed, and performed other mundane finger exercises for hours to jar that sensation back into place. For many weeks, I felt worse. I felt that what I was doing was pointless as I saw so visible improvement. But I pushed through these mental obstacles because of my desire to get my life back.

Within a few weeks I had ditched the walker and was up and around on my own. Granted, the walking was slow and uneven, but hey, I was walking. The writing/typing took longer to come around, but it eventually did. Before I knew it, I was performing the little tasks I never used to think twice about but had suddenly lost the ability to do. Soon after, I was behind the wheel again, an achievement I was very proud of.

As I write this today, the neuropathy has significantly healed. I still have balance problems and the coordination and feeling in my hands is not back to normal, but I've come a long way from those nightmarish few months.

Now even though the doctors told me that the nerve damage would slowly but surely heal on its own, I know pushing myself to exercise and walk when I couldn't made a big difference, both mentally and physically. The perseverance I was able to draw upon put me back on the healing track. Regardless of what anyone has told me, I have confidence that one day this will all be gone. Maybe I'll even be able to pick up my guitar again.

Before I shut the memory of those few months out of my brain again, I'd like to share what I came away with. I believe that with any problem in life, be it physical or not, if you have the opportunity to solve it, you should seize that opportunity. And even if it takes time and you feel like quitting, be patient, persevere, and believe that what you are doing will allow you to achieve your goal. In my case, the doctors never guaranteed that my neuropathy would improve or even that practice would help, but I believed that it would. This belief, and my desire to be a normal kid again, allowed me to fight through my mental barriers. Getting better has even allowed me to write this blog, as a post this long back then would have taken me 2 weeks to write.

So, in conclusion, fight on!