“The mind is a powerful tool. Let’s use it to distract and heal us during these trying times.”
As a distance runner, I often found that when the pain hit my legs and abdomen that I could often find something else to focus on to either motivate me or distract me from the pain my body was feeling. My wife is still feeling the anxiety. She has developed a cough but I noticed that it goes away when she is not sitting still. We did a family outing yesterday to a baseball came and her cough magically disappeared. The same thing happened when we went out that evening with friends. But as we went to bed, the cough was there again along with her Ricola lozenges.
Still, she is worried. As I mentioned before, her doctor ordered her a chest X-ray which revealed clear lungs just to make her feel better. We also had more meetings. She went in for an optional Genetic test to see if she is a carrier of a rare gene that studies have found is carried my patients with breast cancer showing a predisposition for ovarian cancer. If your mother had breast and ovarian cancer, it is very likely (50%) that you might have it as well. We are waiting on that test result. My wife also had her MRI of her lymph nodes and other chest. Usually this would have taken place before the meeting with the plastic surgeon, but the scheduling gods were not with us. There was nothing that could be seen from the initial peek at it, but we will have to wait until tomorrow to hear the results from her doctor. Hopefully it will be more good news and everything will continue to go as planned.
In the meantime, my wife and I have decided that she needs to get distracted and keep her mind off of things. She has taken on a huge consulting job that she is going to throw herself into during the next couple of weeks. I took the kids out today so that she could work on the project, get the kids away from her for a bit and immerse herself. It gives her something different to talk about and to keep her mind working over the next 12-14 days.
As for me, those runs are distracting me too from the pain. Only now I can only think of my wife as I go for my runs. How much I love her, how much I respect her, and how much I want her to pull out of this better than ever. Tonight I ran double more normal run as I missed a turn as I was so distracted by my own thoughts. My body felt good and strong. I guess the mind really is the most powerful healing tool in the body.