Everything Changes - The Guide to Young Adult Cancer

I get winded from climbing a flight of stairs.  This is pathetic.  Aside from having two tumors in my neck (which have no impact on my lung capacity) I’m not sick.  I’m just lazy. I’m a skinny, out of shape weakling.  I’ve always hated exercising.

I’ve been a dancer and choreographer most of my life.  But to me it never was exercise; it was a profession.  Since my first surgery I’ve suffered from dizziness that keeps me from dancing.  I feel like I’ve been evicted from the heaven of the dance world and am now walking among mortals who have to face the drudgery of jogging, yoga, and stair masters.  I find exercising utterly and mind numbingly boring.  I detest it.

I’ve tried many strategies to get myself to exercise.  Positive reinforcement: Reading clinical studies about exercise benefits for cancer patients.   Negative reinforcement:Imagining myself  with osteoporosis.  Guilty reinforcement: Thinking of young adult cancer patients who are too sick to even walk.  Creative reinforcement: Rearranging corners of my house as workout space.  Retail reinforcement: Buying a new pair of Adidas.  Practical reinforcement: Creating 20-minute exercise schedules n my mind.  Writerly reinforcement: Writing tips in my book Everything Changes on how to get back into exercise after surgery and treatment.  None of these tricks have worked.

As a cancer patient, I’ve learned that sometimes how I think and feel about something doesn’t really matter.  Sometimes in life you have to force yourself to do things whether you want to or not, like having surgery or radiation. So if exercise is boring to me maybe that just doesn’t matter.  Just do it.  I’m lazy and unmotivated?  Just do it.  Maybe this is why Nike’s slogan Just Do It really stuck.  Perhaps it appeals not only to motivated athletes but also to lazy consumers like me.  I originally thought that writing this blog post outing my slothy lifestyle would shame me into exercising.  I don’t think so.  No trick is going to work for me.  I just have to do it.

Do you have a love, love/hate, or hate relationship to exercise?  How does illness impact your exercise choices?

Check out Everything Changes: The Insider’s Guide to Cancer in Your 20s and 30s for tips and recommendations on how to safely exercise after surgery and treatment.

Our bodies are great at remembering hard times: The smell of alcohol in a hospital makes my heart race.  I can’t wear turtlenecks because they remind me of the compression bandage on my throat after my thyroidectomy.

But the flip side is that our bodies can conjure great experiences too.  Here’s one: My body remembers the days when I was a dancer.  Heat and humidity meant my muscles were always flexible, pliable, and ready to go.  I could enter the studio and launch into the fun stuff with little need to warm up.  Now whenever I’m in heat and humidity, I feel totally motivated to do physical exercise.  (Crazy I know.)

Before my second surgery, I requested to speak with a chaplain.  I got a Lutheran minister.  I was born Jewish, but I’m not religious, and don’t believe in god.  Still, I love hospital chaplains.  In fact, if there were such a thing as God in my mind, he/she might appear to me in the form of a hospital chaplain.

He got me to start visualizing what it was like to relax in bed with my husband.  Yes, it sounded kinda trashy and weird coming from a minister, and freaked me out at first.  But I realized that he knew I loved my husband to pieces, it was really hard being in a hospital in a different city than where I live, and he was trying to make me feel at home and relaxed.  He asked me all about my bedroom.  I told him about the pale yellow walls, my mahogany bureau that belonged to my grandma, and how great it is to dive into bed and put my head on my husband’s chest.  It totally worked.  When the chaplain left I didn’t want my husband or family to come back into the room.  I was so peaceful and relaxed I wanted to be alone.

The words visualization and imagery sound so hokey and new agey to me.  But I guess that is what it was.  And it totally worked.

Have you ever used visualization or imagery to coax yourself into a better mental space during illness?  Was it useful?  Did you use the generic peaceful river scene or a place you had actually experienced before?

Many of you have said your favorite part of my book is HollyAnna’s kick ass cancer and river visualization scene read.  Read it in Everything Changes: The Insider’s Guide to Cancer in Your 20s and 30s.