You’ve been betrayed

After being diagnosed with cancer I chose to go back to school and finish my last semester. I had to go, that’s what I told my family, my close friends, my bishop, and what I told myself over and over again. I had to go, and I had to finish. I had my work cut out for me, and fought so hard. The first two weeks I failed miserably, I went 4 days without sleeping, and found myself sitting my bishops office crying my eyes out, because I was failing. My body was betraying me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I had plans, and my body had others. As I sat there crying to my bishop he said to me “I think you should go home, and if you were my daughter you wouldn’t have even come back” I took that advice and decided that no going home wasn’t an option, and so I decided for the next 11 weeks I wasn’t going to listen to the body that had betrayed me, and I was going to push myself harder then ever. I stopped doing things I needed to because “it wasn’t in the schedule” and I slowly ran my body that had betrayed me straight into the ground, telling myself that sleep could wait until after graduation, mental health could wait until after graduation, and relaxing could wait until after graduation. Promising my doctors (who totally disagreed with this) and myself that after I walked across that stage and got out of the terribly stressful life I had created for myself that then I could rest.  When in reality I had another plan for after graduation, I would spend one week with family, and then one week preparing to go to California and then working 40+ hours a week for 22 weeks. I was lying to my body and this promise of relaxation wasn’t ever on the schedule. So my body decided to plan something else, on Monday April 23 I developed a runny nose. Just a simple runny nose, and then a head ache. I went to bed early and around 3 am after having a vasovagal I lost function of my hands for about 4 hours. Almost immediately after losing function of my hands I went to the ER and spent a  good amount of time being observed and tested. By 10 am I was admitted to the hospital, and spent the next week being tested for every type of infection and virus in the world. I blew out two viens with my ivs, and had blood taken from every vien on both my hands, and almost every spot on my left arm. I developed edema in the back of my head, and still had no answers. After meeting with a doctor, a neurologist, and an infectious disease doctor it was unsure what was happening. One said it was an infection, another said a nasty virus. Finally on the last day in the hospital the infectious disease doctor said I had cold, and this was my bodies way of fighting. Here I am 2 weeks later, and I still have that cold and California isn’t going to happen. It seems that the body that I had betrayed has decided that it’s its turn to do the same. I am being forced to rest and recover and as much as I hate this and keep trying to fight it and tell myself it’s not on the schedule, it sort of has to be on the schedule. It breaks my heart that I can’t do what I want to be doing right now, and that my plans have changed. But I have to recover, and I have denied my body this for far too long.