Haven't written my blog in a while, not since we got back from Corsica nearly a month ago. I was going to write a reflective, musing piece about the solace of walking, but this might turn into something else, as there are other, more pressing, things on my mind right now. I was a great walker - John and I have done several long distance hikes in this country, we've been accustomed to doing long walks around the beautiful countryside here on a daily basis, and I've also done the Inca Trail and hiked in the Khumbu in Nepal. Now I just don't have the energy for feats like that, and it makes me sad. The old dog is getting increasingly arthritic, so it's out of the question for her to walk for more than an hour or so now, and I can't say that I'm much different, though for a different reason. But some time ago I signed up for a Marie Curie Walk 10 at Margam Park in two weeks' time, and I've got to get fit for it. I'll be doing it with some of my Inca Trail chums. We all met 10 years ago and we have a reunion every year. The Walk 10 isn't a formal reunion - that takes place in October - but just a get-together for those of us who live in Wales. So I bought myself a pedometer, and started off with the easy target of 10,000 steps per day. Some interesting observations: you don't have to do long daily walks to easily reach this target, which is supposed to be the baseline fitness target - a bit like the exercise equivalent of 5 fruit & veg per day. I quickly found that just moving around the house, especially if you're always forgetting something that you left upstairs, or even deliberately taking one thing at a time up or downstairs, rapidly enables you to reach this quite modest target. In fact I was surprised that walking the dog might only contribute to half or even a third of my daily target but that just doing normal stuff around the house and garden would easily make up the difference, especially if I am using a watering can for the garden instead of a hose. I got up to 14,000 per day quite soon, and was hoping to get back to my customary 18,000 or so of a couple of years ago.
But recently even 10,000 steps has seemed too much, and it's not to do with fatigue. Rather it's the state of my insides. As you can imagine, I don't want to discuss this in too much detail here - it's just too intimate a topic - but things have got increasingly bad since pelvic radiotherapy nearly four years ago. They got markedly worse at the end of chemo in May, but my colorectal nurse insists that what I am suffering from is radiotherapy damage and not from chemo. My GP calls it 'radiation proctitis'. Essentially, my bowel doesn't really work any more on its own. It needs help in the form of pharmaceuticals, but working out how much, or rather how little, help is the key. And I'm not there yet. It's on a knife edge, and can easily be pushed too far one way or the other. My entire abdomen is very tender and inflamed, and that brings me back to walking. Walking really hurts my tummy. Isn't that ridiculous? It's like it gets all jogged around by the movement of walking. I'm in a low-grade state of pain all the time, but movement makes it worse. For an active person like me, this is terribly hard to cope with. How on earth am I going to cope with Walk 10 for instance? Maybe I won't, maybe I'll just have to cancel.
There is one form of relief that I've discovered, and that's swimming. Strangely enough, it doesn't hurt when I swim. Something to do with the weightlessness of being in water perhaps? So I'm swimming most mornings, and that is a help. I still feel the pins and needles in my hands, and sometimes also in my feet, when swimming, but I can cope with that. There's a psychological element too, I'm sure. Distracting myself by counting lengths is one way to do it.
The other problem is eating. I've done numerous elimination diets over the course of the last year, and have become convinced that, while no particular food irritates my gut more than any other, eating more than a small amount of anything leads to bloating and pain. So I'm eating less and less, and my appetite is dwindling. I cook a meal, then sit and look at it and think 'I just can't face this'. I've completely gone off fruit, vegetables, fish - everything that I know to be healthy and good for me, and that I used to love. I can only eat a little toast from time to time, and strangely, cake, biscuits etc, though in tiny quantities. Of course I'm losing weight, but the calorific content of what I do eat means that it's not yet a worrying loss. My BMI is currently 18.9 so that's just on the low edge of normal. But this not-eating thing does impact on my life, especially my social life. I'm no fun to go out with, picking at my food, looking miserable and uncomfortable and rushing to the ladies' all the time. So I am beginning to avoid social situations, cancel dates in my diary, and feel safer at home. But that's not much of a life. Being the optimist that I am, I keep hoping that I and/or my medical team will finally hit upon a solution. I'm trying different medications to see what works for me, but as my GP said recently, 'we have no magic bullet for you, there is no easy answer'.
