My trip to the dentist today uncovered some interesting things.
Before I get into that, I travelled to Gisborne over the weekend to attend the funeral of the husband of one of my cousins. I'm not going to go into too much detail, but will say the service was a wonderful celebration of the life of obviously a much loved husband, father, brother and friend. I was blown away by the strength shown by Lynette and her sons and my love goes out to them all.
OK, the dentist today was to address the two holes on my left side and despite all the dental work I've had over the years, it was the first time I've had the nitrous as part of the process. I'm now a convert.
While I was in the chair, I had time to think about my pain thresh-hold and reaction to pain. Ashwin, bless him ,was doing his best not to hurt me as he drilled, etc, but there was a couple of times when I winced. Now, I've had so many people poking and prodding at me, taking blood, giving me drips, drugs, etc, not to mention the chemo and radio, that you'd think I would have built up a fair tolerance. And, in all honesty, I thought I had, but I've been questioning that of late and today confirmed my thoughts - I still don't like pain.
I'll credit the drugs (morphine rocks) with my perceived increased tolerance, but it could also have been that it was so much a part of the routine that I just switched off. Now I've been "clean" for so long, my aversion seems to have returned to normal. When I got my celebratory tattoo last month, I felt a fair amount of pain, but put that down to the loss of muscle condition and weight meaning there wasn't as much padding any more. Today merely confirmed that this aspect of my recovery is back to normal - I feel pain just like I used to. So, in future, I'll be adding the nitrous to my dental treatments.
Another observation / subtle change. As a result of the road trip, I've worked out that when I do things out of the norm that requires more effort/exertion (or whatever you want to call it), my body has developed a mechanism to make me take it easy as it recovers. Clever thing the body. In my case, I get a bout of the sniffles for a couple of days. When it first happened, it was after my first late night outing, so as I'm susceptible to the cold now anyway, I put it down to the night air. It happened again on each of the other times I've been out late, but when it happened during the road trip (Gisborne was a balmy 22 degrees each day, so you can't blame the cold), the penny finally dropped. I'm finally coming right again now and have a little warning signal to heed in the future. I'm sure over time I'll find a way to know when I'm about to over stretch myself and thus avoid the sniffles.
In case you were wondering about the tattoo, it is of the cancer society daffodil design. When I started treatment, I promised myself I'd get that tattoo once I came out the other side and beat the cancer (I might not have the official all clear yet, but as far as I'm concerned I won, it lost), as a reminder of how lucky I have been and the 2nd chance I have been given. It's on my right shoulder and here it is..
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