Picking myself up and dusting myself off

Each day after a chemo I spend my time licking my wounds.  By that I mean, slowly I am recovering from all the chemicals coursing through my body.  I have my treatments 3 our of 4 Fridays a month.  On the days that follow, I feel fatigue, aches and pains, emotional highs and lows.  The fatigue starts slow and builds to a crescendo around day 3-4.  That is when I am at the most tired and sick feeling.  Because I eat a steady diet of anti nausea meds, I never really get sick to the point of throwing up.  But because of those meds I experience the side effects which are more fatigue!  Yay!  ( she said sarcastically) Up to day 4 I also have a lot of pains in all the areas that I have lesions from cancer.  Those are my bones in my right arm, both pelvic bones, and also my lungs and chest wall.  But the pain is mostly in my hips and arm.  So for the pain I take pain medicines, and those too make me fatigued and emotional.   Then after day 4 I stop taking the drugs.  The fatigue gets better and then on day 7 I start chemo again.  Oh what a wonderful roller coaster ride eh? 

Picking myself up isn't as simple as it sounds.    It is really  more of an emotion, physical and spiritual  thing that takes place.  It is kind of like turning myself inside out and then right side to.    First my body and soul physically get so down and tired that it makes me sad and quiet.  I find myself laying around a lot trying to get energy.  At the same time I want to be as normal as possible so emotionally I become sad that I want to lay around because I feel so sick.  So, I force myself to do normal stuff like empty the dishes and run laundry, go to the store with family, grocery shop and go to church.  That is one of the things that leads to a vicious cycle of being too tired and then not recovering from it.  After almost 4 months of chemo I have learned that it is okay to let people help and to rest a bit.  But I still make myself do stuff, so that that remainder of my life as a metastatic breast cancer patient is a full life.  It also helps me to not see myself as a breast cancer patient and as more of a person who has metastatic cancer but is living as normal of a life as possible.  When you have metastatic breast cancer or mets of any type, what is normal anymore though?