Some Girls Prefer Carnations: Fitness and Cancer

Obviously it's important to stay physically fit, no matter who you are. But if you are a cancer patient or survivor, it is particularly important. Maintaining a healthy weight for your body could improve your prognosis, both by helping you cope with the side effects of treatment and by decreasing the chance for recurrence.

Physical fitness might be the last thing on your mind while you are running through the cancer gauntlet, so here I've collected my posts on the subject of physical activity both during and after my cancer treatment. Hopefully you will find something inspirational, if not informational.

Walking to chemotherapy: Blue machine-->puke machine
Walking in my neighborhood in the spring, 1 month after mastectomy: Beauty
Walking to radiation: Yet another brand of fatigue
Biking despite painful radiation side effects: Cancer treatment didn't kill me, and Many ups, just a few tiny downs (Note: In this post I claim to have fallen off the exercise wagon, but in hindsight I was wrong to be so hard on myself. I always walked around my neighborhood, often pushing a stroller, not to mention the weeks of physical therapy exercises. In the winter months when I was feeling well-ish I walked indoors with Leslie Sansone and my kids, just a mile at a time. It's about doing what exercises you CAN do, not about what you used to do or what you think you should be doing.)
Biking to work in the rain, 3 months after radiation: Ooo, that tickles
Cutest bike date ever, 4 months after radiation: Bike date with Nori
Starting yoga, 5 months after radiation: Music to my mind and muscles
Biking in The Netherlands, 1 year after diagnosis: The Netherlands

Books I've read recently

TRUTH AND BEAUTY by Ann Patchett "'Grief isn't something to "be gotten through." It has no life of its own like that, it's just plain and simply there.'" and "History is strangely incomprehensible when you're standing in the middle of it."
THE PATRON SAINT OF LIARS by Ann Patchett "I wanted to be able to stop hoping that she would turn into something else."
MY OWN COUNTRY by Abraham Verghese "I remember the acts of human kindness that illumine our world."
IN THE COMPANY OF CHEERFUL LADIES: No. 1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY NOVEL #6 by Alexander McCall Smith
CEREMONY by Leslie Marmon Silko
THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG by Muriel Barbery "There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature..."
A WALK IN THE WOODS by Bill Bryson
THE LACUNA by Barbara Kingsolver "'Soli, let me tell you. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.'"
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE by Lucy Grealy "Sooner or later we all have to learn the words with which to name our own private losses..." and "Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people..." and "Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them."
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS by Sarah Gruen "Age is a terrible thief. Just when you're getting the hang of life, it knocks your legs out from under you and stoops your back. It makes you ache and muddies your head and silently spreads cancer throughout your spouse."
THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett "'I have decided not to die.'" and "Oh, I just break down then. It's like two years a doing and trying and hoping all come out at once."
THE TENNIS PARTNER by Abraham Verghese "Would that I had the chance in my sons' lifetime and my own to one day explain to them all the forces that moved me."
THE BLUEST EYE by Toni Morrison "And then the tears rushed down his cheeks, to make a bouquet under his chin."
REMARKABLE CREATURES by Tracy Chevalier "My life led up to that moment, then led away again, like the tide making its highest mark on the beach and then retreating."
RAMONA QUIMBY, AGE 8 by Beverly Cleary "Mrs. Quimby smiled and said, 'I can tell you're beginning to get well when you act like a wounded tiger.'"
THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway "You see, Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived so very much that now I can enjoy everything so well."
THE FORGOTTEN GARDEN by Kate Morton "The happiest folk are those that are busy, for their minds are starved of time to seek out woe." And, speaking of hospitals: "An irony that a place relying so heavily on routine should operate so resolutely outside time's usual rhythms."
THE HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins "Of course, the odds have not been very dependable of late."
THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot "That cancer was a terrible thing."
THE THIEF OF ALWAYS by Clive Barker "Was there some way...to take back the stolen years, and live them here, with the people who loved him, and whom he loved dearly in return?"
CUTTING FOR STONE by Abraham Verghese "The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not." Best book I've read in a year

Some Girls Prefer Carnations

Pages

Fitness and Cancer

1 comment:

Contact the author

Total Pageviews