Feet Back Under Me Days 5 & 6: Desire, Adrenaline & Acceptance.

I feel like I often find myself thinking and saying the words "I use to..." and then insert activity afterwards.  One of those activities that has become frustrating when I want to take a long trip (or sometimes a short one!) is driving.  I have to back up and explain something first about my relationship with driving.

I was born with an eye condition called Ocular Albanisim.  Basically it is a mutated gene (hello X Men!  Just without the cool powers!) that affects my ability to create melanin and therefor stops my body from producing pigment.  Hence the pale skin that burns easily, the blue eyes that are hurt by bright light and the blonde hair that chemo gave a little more dash of red to.  It affects my eyes through nystagmus, stigmatism and reduced visual acuity.  My parents were told when I was a baby that I would be lucky to tell day from night.  Well, apparently God had other plans.  While acuity can improve in kids with albanisim up to about age 7 or 8, mine continued to improve into my teen years.  It fluctuates a line now and then depending on if I am in school or not and the amount of eye strain I have but with correction, it improved enough for me to be able to safely drive.

I will admit it took me a long time to trust myself since most of my life it was made painfully obvious to me that I didn't have the same vision as everyone around me.  My parents gave me everything I needed to succeed and always encouraged me to keep reaching and not let my vision be a reason to give up.  After a demoralizing experience at 16 with a bit of a jerk driving instructor who didn't like home schoolers or people with disabilities (I struck out twice!), I eventually got my license in my early twenties.  And my first car about a year later.  It took time but eventually I found myself driving back and forth from Virginia to Michigan.  I would hit the road in the evening and drive through the night along the turnpikes when the traffic was light.  That was about an 11 hour drive for me since I didn't have a lead foot and stopped for breaks.  But I did it without blinking.

After treatment I slowly started driving again and it took a while to build up my stamina.  Desire and adrenaline were two main things that got me places and through events for about a year or two after I finished chemo.  It still does today.  I guess the frustrating thing is even today, I have a max limit of about 3 hours driving time before my body and my eyes become too tired and I have to pull over for several hours of real rest.  And that drives me crazy!

I don't like limitations on myself.  My parents raised me to be independent and to find ways around what most people in this world would call limits.  And I always found ways.  And I suppose with driving a great deal of what keeps me going is desire to reach my destination and the adrenaline of the excitement of what is taking me to that destination.  But there is a third ingredient; acceptance.  And this is truly the hardest to put into the mix.  I have built up the stamina in my body to do my job which requires a great deal of driving but never more than an hour and a half or two hours tops one way.  Then I am out of the car and working with my clients and just pumped over the progress we make that the drive to the next client or back to the office isn't hard.  The difficult part where I have to stir in acceptance is when I make weekend or vacation plans.  A work week takes a toll on me now and come the weekend, I want to relax and have fun!  Which generally requires driving.  This is when desire and adrenaline have to be tempered by acceptance that maybe, just maybe, now and then I have to take a weekend off.  Or plan that weekend around the stamina my body has after a long week.

It 's one of those affects of everything I have gone through that will never be back to how it was before but I know I am not alone in those things in life.  It's frustrating that something cases my eyes and body to become tired so quickly in comparison to before.   Its frustrating that my brain won't recall words when I need it too more often than someone my age should be dealing with.  The short term memory moments are a treat too!  And lord help me, the hot flashes, cold flashes!  I am just grateful that the flash backs are not as often or as intense all the time.

But then I wake up to my alarm, head to work, drive to my first client of the day and look at all the beauty around me.  My three ingredients to deal with the after affects of chemo start to blend together; Desire to be at the work I do, adrenaline from helping my clients move forward and succeed and the acceptance that it's ok that my life isn't the same.  It's my life and I am blessed to have such a good life.  

Desire, adrenaline and acceptance...the often difficult but effective recipe I have cooked up over the past four years.  Give it a try and let me know what you think! :)