Rolling right along

I continue to slowly feel better.  I still feel a little bit like a have a cold, but it's gotten to the point where it's fairly minimal.  If things were just ordinary, I probably wouldn't think too much about it.  Except for the fact that it's been going on for more than 3 months now.  Lorien still has a bit of a cold as well -- in fact, I think at this point she might be a little worse off than I am.  Although hers has been going on for only 3 weeks, but that's still long enough to be pretty annoying.

I've been continuing to go on walks most days around the neighborhood.  It's helped that, unlike my last posting, it's actually gotten quite warm and pleasant lately.  Yesterday I felt good enough to try getting on my bike, for the first time in quite some time.  A month, perhaps?  It was a pretty short and easy ride, just to South Berkeley, relatively flat.  The last time I did a similar ride, which had also been the first attempt in a while, the return trip was kind of grueling, and the overall experience convinced me that maybe I wasn't quite in good enough shape yet to be riding my bike.  Thankfully, this time, the results were much better, and I hope to continue gradually increasing my activity level.

I'm also continuing to go in weekly for blood work and meeting with my oncologist, and my counts are looking pretty good.  Good enough that I got the go-ahead to get a flu shot when I went in this past Thursday.

So I'm cautiously optimistic.  Of course, the last time I got cautiously optimistic following a gradual improvement following a hospital stay, I ended up back in the hospital again.  But I've already gone longer since hospital visit #2 compared to the time between #1 and #2, so that's a little something to celebrate.

The bottom line is that I've decided that I'm well enough to start working again.  Tomorrow.  It'll have been a 5 week hiatus since my last attempt at working, which itself lasted for 5 weeks (before hospital stay #1).  Hopefully this return will be for good.  Or at least until I feel well enough that we finally take a much delayed vacation (tentatively to France, sans Dylan).

For the time being it's going to be just half time.  I'm not making any particular plans yet about when that will be ramped up to full time.  It will depend on how I feel.  I'd also like for now to leave enough free time so that I can continue to get some exercise on most days, as I think it's somewhat important for my overall recovery.

But even though my counts look good, I'm still concerned that my immune system is weakened.  An office may not be quite as bad as a preschool or daycare, but it still can be a fairly unforgiving breeding ground for spreading germs.  Especially during a flu season as bad as this one.  So for the time being, I'm going to be working 100% from home.  We need to do a little work down in the basement to make our office setup hospitable for 2 people to be working simultaneously.  Which will be one of my first tasks tomorrow morning.