I started losing my hair after the second chemo treatment.
It was terrifying.
You don’t realize what losing your due to chemo means until you’ve experienced it first hand. It’s not like your hair sheds more, as it does with women postpartum or when men start losing their hair after a certain age.
It falls out in large clumps, without warning. You brush your hand casually against your hair and are left with a thick clump of it in your hand. It was like something out of a cheap horror movie, like some sort of farce. I had no idea my body could do that. Why hadn’t anyone told me that this was how it was going to be?
It also hurt. It was if my scalp suddenly felt the weight of each and every hair, and it couldn’t take it anymore. Imagine the feeling of having weights tied to each hair follicle, constantly tugging your hair down, and you’ll get some kind of idea how it feels.
I lost the most hair during the first shower after my second chemo treatment, and I couldn’t get to the hairdresser fast enough. “Off, I want all of it off!” I commanded him. He gave me a buzzcut that made me look like a punky 16 year old, but I was relieved. My scalp stopped hurting, and I didn’t see hair falling out in clumps anymore. Yes, my hair kept falling out throughout the treatments — normal hair falling out an a strange fuzzy plume growing instead only to fall out too — but I didn’t feel it and I didn’t see the scary clumps. That was good enough for me.
You see it was these clumps that gave me a vivid visual representation of just what my body was going through. You don’t otherwise see the damage the chemotherapy is doing to each and every one of your cells — you just feel it. So when I go that buzzcut I was taking control, pushing the damage away so I could better handle it. Other patients react differently to this message — oftentimes with denial, or by fighting it. They hold on to every wisp of hair, they hope against hope that somehow they won’t be affected.
At the time I thought they were being silly and immature and just causing themselves unnecessary pain. I know better now. This journey is excruciatingly hard and scary for anyone who goes through it. What gets you through, how you react to it, these are personal things that cannot and should not be judged, even by a fellow cancer patient. Some of us need to mourn through our hair. I needed to learn that and accept that. One of the things that helped me do that is the bitter realization that we live in a world where losing your hair isn’t a superficial change.
My dad went through open heart surgery to replace his aortic valve and repair his aorta. The surgery went well, but the recovery is long and hard. He’s home now bus still severely limited in what he can do, and dealing with the surgery’s side effects. We have about a month more of regular tests, hospital visits, and recovery before he can start building back his strength again.
I’ve had a lot of hospital time lately, which has meant a PTSD flare up. I’m struggling not to fall back to my old coping habits, and I’m journaling a lot to help with that – journaling and running.
I went to see a special “Angels in America” event – part 1 and part 2 in the same day, with a panel with the production’s creatives, and an exhibition about the play in between. It was a fantastic and very moving experience, and the 6 1/2 hours of the play passed in the blink of an eye. I bought three postcards with sketches from the production development and will use them to send postcards to my family.
Angels in America postcards
Next month is my turn at the hospital, as my oncological checkup is coming up. I’ve started lining up the pre-checkup appointments and tests, but I really hope that I get my stress levels from my dad’s procedure down ASAP because they’re about to sky-rocket as the checkup day approaches.
Next month is one week 100 people and I intend to join it again – but this time I won’t be posting to social media. I’ve stopped posting and using social media for the past two months, and it’s been tremendously beneficial for both my productivity and my mental state. If you need encouragement to do the same I suggest watching this video or reading Cal Neport’s Deep Work.
I’m about to restart the cancer project (a series of essays on my journey with cancer), but not through the alphabet superset challenge, nor are my posts going to be deeply technical. I’m going back to personal essays with insights and tips embedded in them. I find them to be more genuine and more genuinely useful, and I didn’t like the arbitrary constraint of the alphabetical posts as a framework for the subject.
I’ve been spending practically every day for the past week or so with my dad in hospital.
There’s this phenomena that when you most need journaling, the it will help you the most, you find yourself least able to do it.
Hospitals are journaling hostile environments. There are no tables to use, there’s constant noise and distractions, there’s zero privacy and you never know when the staff will pop into the room with something. Whether you yourself are hospitalized or you’re there with someone else, there’s very little opportunity to crack open your journal and start writing.
Hospitals are also where weird, interesting, scary and new things happen, so you generally do what to write about them, to process them on paper. Fo instance, today three policemen escorted a prisoner into the heart surgery department. It wasn’t something I ever expected to see, a sort of non-sequitur that took me a minute or two to process.
The solution is to take temporary notes on your phone, put a reminder for an appointment with your journal in the evening or when things quiet down around you.
If you’re the one hospitalized, try to journal two or three times a day, documenting what’s going on, how you’re feeling, what the staff said, who visited you, etc. The best time to journal is during the nursing staff shift changes, because that’s when nobody will bother you.
Journaling is like running – oftentimes it’s really hard to start, but I haven’t regretted a run or a journaling session yet.
At night you can escape to these empty spaces and write
My dad went through open-heart surgery to replace his aortic valve and to repair his aortic aneurysm on Thursday night. The surgery went well, and he spent about 12 hours in the ICU before being transferred to an intermediate department prior to being transferred to the “regular” heart surgery department. He started eating today, and they started to gradually remove the tubes and wires he was connected to. He’s still on oxygen support, he’s still not able to sit independently or walk, and he’s still got a long road to recovery, but we’re getting there.
This week’s blog post was written in advance, and though I approved the comments on it, I haven’t had time to read them. My days are now devoted to hospital runs, hospital bureaucracy (always a delight), and running to maintain my sanity throughout this process. As my PTSD has had a significant flare up with all the extra hospital time, running, reading, journaling and meditation are what’s helped me stay on the path.
I don’t know how next week will unfold. I will resume posting and replying to comments when I can. In the meantime, there’s a pretty good archive of posts here which you are welcome to browse.
When my brother and I visited The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando we bought a pack of postcards and some postage at Hogsmeade and posted some postcards home. They have a little “Owl Post” booth where you can get your postcard stamped with an owl post stamp, and it’s a charming experience. We ended up with a few postcards left over, so we posted them from our Disney hotel. A few weeks after we got home the postcards arrived and made out day.
I was just at a Shalom Sebba exhibition at the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art and after my visit I went to the museum store and bought some postcards there. Later that evening I spent some time writing postcards for my family, with little sketches inspired by Sebba’s work:
I had no idea where I would post them, as most of the post boxes in my area have been removed, but I wanted to at least try to post them before my dad’s surgery this week. With today’s postal service sending them would be a bit like tossing a message in a bottle into the sea and hoping it would eventually arrive at its destination. Yet there’s something about not just the wonderful experience of receiving snail mail which I wanted to give to my family, but something particular about postcards that made me want make the effort to post these cards that I could more easily hand deliver myself.
More than letter postcards evoke some things to me – a break from routine, a holiday, exotic places, better days. There’s something creative about the selection you make, and they make me want to sketch in them, write in their margins, be creative in the tiny space I’m given to work with. The limited space, zero privacy and the need to withstand the elements at least somewhat makes them a creative challenge we rarely encounter in days where everyone is an instant message away.
Yet that’s what made them appeal to me, because more than anything postcards speak of hope, and these days I need all the hope I can get.
My dad is going through open heart surgery next week to replace his aortic valve and repair his aorta. It’s a serious surgery. I’ve been lining up so posts in the buffer for the next two weeks, but my posting schedule may be erratic in the near future.
Sketch on Midori TN sketch paper with a Faber Castell 4B water soluble graphite.
With time blocked planning the idea is to break down your day into blocks of time where you do things. The point is to structure your day so that you’re never faced with the question of “what do I do next?” Instead you sit down ahead of time and block out large sections of time where you do a specific large task, or bundle together a group of small tasks. You don’t block the day out into a minute by minute plan, but instead work in blocks of at least 30 minutes and usually 1-2 hours.
The idea isn’t new, and I haphazardly gave it a try when I was a student, and not surprisingly I failed spectacularly at it. It was only very recently when I decided to give it a serious try. The reason I decided to give time blocking a try was to solve a problem that I think is pretty common: I’d run out of steam about two-thirds into my day and end up just vegging out in the evenings, not accomplishing what I wanted, not even consuming the sort of media that really interested me. There’s only so many decisions my mind could make throughout the day, and late in the afternoon I would run on empty.
Since I was already “front-loading” my day (i.e. doing the really important work first thing in the morning or as early as possible) it was pretty easy to see the benefit of deciding what to do at a given point of time early on in the day, or even the night before. My issue with time blocking in the past had been that my work day is inherently unstructured. I may plan to work on something in the morning, but then a slack message or an email comes in, or someone bursts into the room with a problem and suddenly I’m working on something completely different.
Here, however, is where maturity kicks in. When I gave time blocking a chance years ago, I didn’t really take it seriously as an approach to work and life. Once something interrupted my day (and something always interrupted my day), the plan went out the window never to return. The plans rarely survived until lunchtime, and very quickly I decided that there was little point in time blocking for people like me. What I failed to realize at the time was that the majority of people are people like me: we live in a world where we are constantly being interrupted, and rarely does the day end in the way we envisioned it at the beginning.
Given this new found realization, and the realization that some very smart, very accomplished people whose work I follow use time blocking successfully and consistently, it was clear that the issue wasn’t with time blocking itself but with how I was approaching it. So I decided to make a more consistent, serious attempt to use time blocking for at least a month or two and see where it gets me.
I’m still very early into the process, but I decided to write about it as I go along, so I’ll have a record of how I tweaked things, and for those who like me, wanted to try time blocking but have failed in the past. Maybe my successes and failures will help them in their journey.
The First Mistakes
I started out with two mistakes, one easily fixed and another a mistake that I’m still working on correcting. The first mistake was trying to create separate time blocks for my work day and my “home day”. That failed spectacularly. Lesson learned: you need to follow one timeline, one plan, from waking up until going to sleep. If you use two different plans you are setting yourself up to fail because you’re creating two points in the day where you have to switch plans. While the morning switch may be relatively easy, by the time you’re off work you don’t feel like opening a different notebook or calendar and seeing what it is exactly that you’re supposed to be doing right now. I kept my home plan on a Rhodia dot pad and my work plan on a Moleskine squared notebook, and it just didn’t work for me. I had to carry two different plans with me, I had to reference and cross reference them, it was a mess. Now I have one plan per day, on a Rhodia dot pad.
The second mistake is one that I’m still working on correcting, which is what do I do when things don’t go as planned. What I should be doing is taking 5 minutes and replanning the rest of my day basically from that point onwards. What I currently do and doesn’t work well is either try to get back to the plan the moment I can (at which point things start to fall apart pretty quickly), or try to make only minor adjustments to the plan. The reality is that if there’s a significant break in my plan (i.e. something that takes more than 30 minutes to deal with), then I need to take a few minutes to stop and completely reassess my day. No, I will not be able to fit everything I planned into it now. Yes, my energy reserves are most likely more depleted at this point than I originally planned. Rather than trying to stick to the plan and crashing and burning, I need to be kinder to myself and look at what’s left of my day with fresh eyes. “That production outage took a lot from me, so let’s switch things up so I have a lighter workload until I’ve had a chance to recover, maybe even schedule a significant break here. Then rebuild my evening so I also have a bit more recovery time then – add a meditation session, or more reading time, etc.”. This is something I’m currently working on doing consistently.
The First Successes
While I’ve been time blocking only for a short time, I have already seen the value of this system. I’m getting much more done, and I am able to dedicate long stretches of time focused on meaningful work. I batch emails to the beginning and end of the day, and slack messages only to the times between large blocks of deep focus. I haven’t had an episode of mindless YouTube watching in the evenings since I’ve started. I’m reading more, journaling more, meditating more, spending more meaningful time with friends and family. I’m also being much more realistic about my goals. Once you start putting things in the context of the hours you have in the day, it becomes easier to assess how much you can get done in a given day.
A sample of a time block plan.
It’s not just a result of the time blocking itself, of course. It’s also the way I’ve structured my year, a commitment to deep focus and digital minimalism which mean no social media, no mindless media consumption, more reading and more deliberate practice of the things that matter to me. I’m also far from reaching a point where the way in which I time block my day is stable, well-defined routine. Things are still shifting around as I’m recording in my journal what worked and what didn’t work. While I’m not looking for perfection, I do want to reach a point where I have a system that works for me (and not I for it), and that helps me better shape my days.
I’ll be writing more about time blocking in the future, whether my experiments with it succeed or fail. If you’re giving it a try or use time block planning regularly I’d love to hear your thoughts on it in the comments.
Happy fountain pen day to all who celebrate. I purchased a Leonardo Momento Zero Nuvola rose gold fine flex nib from Fontoplumo with the hopes that it will arrive at some point in the future (deliveries are still severely delayed).
Unlike past years I’ve started working on my Inkvent reviews now instead of in real time, as a way to make them less stressful. I decided to theme my sketches this year around my teddy bear collection.
My PTSD has been kicking my ass since Tuesday, when I got caught in a crowded shelter (small room, no windows, closed door, large rocket barrage. Couldn’t have been more triggering if I’d designed it). I’m taking some time off daily posting to take care of myself.
Writing at Large 