Week 1 was a dud. Since I started mid-week, I had two easy miles scheduled for the entire week and I did not even manage to get those in. You may recall that I was freaking out about my hair, and, yes, for real, I did not run because I was worried about stressing it too much and making it fall out faster.

Fast forward to Week 2. I decided that my hair is going to do whatever it is going to do, so I got in all seven miles that I had scheduled. Really not much to be proud of as I think of myself as someone who throws down seven mile runs, not seven mile weeks, but still an improvement over Week 1; I’ll take it. Also worth noting, neither of these runs was as dreadfully slow as I expected them to be. Not that I was breaking land speed records or anything, but I was at least easily running a 9:15 pace – far quicker than the easy 11:58 pace my plan prescribed.

I have decided to adjust the goal paces in the plan as these are a bit slow even at 80 degrees with a jogging stroller. I was aiming for something low key and attainable, but perhaps I need a bit more of a challenge. I can always back off if I do not have enough energy when the distances get longer.

So here we are at Week 3 with a new faster plan.

• Monday – 3 miles @ 11:27
• Wednesday – 4 Mi, including w/u; 2×1600 in 9:17 w/800 jogs; c/d
• Saturday – 5 miles @ 11:27

I’m confident that I can accomplish this, but I am doubtful that I will be able to talk myself into running much more than this; I just haven’t been that stoked about going running lately. So I don’t become a complete sloth, I have been giving some thought to what I might like to do instead.

Now that the ducks have moved, I have started kicking around the idea of turning our garage into a gym. Chris’ interest seems to be piqued, but we haven’t taken any action on that yet. In the meantime, I’m thinking about re-starting up my garage version of New Rules of Lifting for Women. Since I am having a lot more trouble than usual getting motivated to run, maybe it is time to switch things up a bit. In some sadistic way, I kind of miss the Body Weight Matrix, so this might be the way to go.

As an alternative, I have also been kicking around the idea of joining my local CrossFit box, but I can’t really figure out how it fits into my schedule. I have been hearing so much buzz about CrossFit lately, that I’m über tempted to jump on that bandwagon, but the group workouts are from 7-8 AM and 6-7 PM. I generally try to be at work at or before 8 AM and Kai likes to go to bed at 7 PM. CrossFit is probably out, huh?

My last alternative might be to get my bike fixed and set up my bike trainer again. After months of riding mostly in place while in India, I’m kind of over the bike trainer, but riding outside really isn’t practical right now.

Heavy stuff, I know.

By late afternoon, Chris has finished up their new digs and we just needed to move the ducks themselves. Piece of cake, right?

To simplify matters, we waited for Kai to go to bed before beginning the duck wrangling process. The first method of transport that we selected was via wheelbarrow. Our strategy was to move ten ducks at a time; if anything went wrong, we did not want to have the whole badling of ducks in transit at one time.

I stood on one side of the kiddie pool to encourage them to congregate on the other side, Chris would swoop in on the side opposite me and try to grab one with each hand as they ran back toward me. He placed the ducks that he caught in the wheelbarrow where I monitored to make sure that nobody escaped. After a few go-arounds, Chris has placed ten ducks in the wheelbarrow and we began to make our way the hundred yards or so to their new home. Duke, of course, loved this game.

Chris made little progress with the wheelbarrow before deciding that it needed to remain level. Instead of rolling it, we each picked up one side of it and carried it the rest of the way, rambunctious puppy in tow.

When we finally arrived at their new home, we realized that the wheelbarrow would not fit through the gate. Duke and I stood guard as Chris unloaded the ducks. This was not ideal.

We ditched the wheelbarrow and instead found a deep cardboard box.

Back to the garage, back to wrangling ducks. Chris was getting much better at catching them, but as the population in the pool thinned out, it became obvious that the more nimble of the ducks were the ones left. This time he got ten ducks put into the cardboard box, which he carried across the yard. Much easier.

One last trip, and finally all thirty ducks had arrived at their new home. After a few last adjustments to the heat lamps and double checking their food and water, we decided that the ducks were much better outside than in our garage. I am so relieved to have them outside!

Like any rational person would do, I started freaking out.

Finally on Thursday, days later, I realized that I should seek help. I placed a call to a salon at “home”, told my sob story, and asked if they could help. Not only was I asking for a major color change, I was asking for next day service from the owner of a very busy salon, but he was the only person who I trusted to do this because, in my mind, it was a one-shot deal. After a few short phone calls, we decided that I would overnight the wig to them to be highlighted on Friday.

I carefully tracked the package on Friday morning, to see that it arrived ok. After it was delivered, I felt so relieved to know that I was going to have a wig that somewhat resembles my hair color and I excitedly awaited its arrival back in Indiana on Monday.

Monday morning, I obsessively tracked the package until 9:16 AM when it finally showed up as “Delivered” on the FedEx website. At noon, when I arrived home to check it out, I couldn’t find any package at my door.

I walked the whole way around my house. It was not at any door.

My heart started racing. Have I mentioned that I ordered a custom made wig from New York? It took almost two weeks for it to arrive. I wasn’t exactly feeling like I had another two weeks to work with.

I immediately called FedEx. The problem is, that you can’t call your local FedEx office directly. The woman I spoke to at the national number said that my local office would call me back later. Wait, what? I need to know what happened to it now!

An hour later, my local FedEx office called me to tell me that the package was likely delivered to my house number on a different street. Well can you go get it? All of the couriers were busy. I was told that they would investigate the next morning. This didn’t sit well with me. The longer my package went missing, the less likely that it would turn up.

I frantically called the national FedEx number back. They were not able to offer much help. Within a few hours, I decided to drive over to my local FedEx office and make another appeal for help. Nothing.

In a desperate maneuver, I put the other address into my GPS and headed out to a country road southwest of town to retrieve the package myself. I counted down the house numbers as I got close, then I realized that the address didn’t exist. What?

If my heart was racing earlier when I realized the package was missing, it was all but leaping out of my chest now. For some reason, instead of a rational maneuver like crying about it, I decided to keep searching for my package.

I checked up and down that street before deciding to head to my own street to look just in case. I’m sure that my neighbors now know me as the crazy lady who creeps down the street, neck craned out the window, staring at thier houses…

… but it doesn’t matter. On the sixth porch in my neighborhood, I found my package. Luckily it was our friends’ porch; I would have gotten my package anyway if I had been more patient, but I did not know that when I started my search.

Now this whole thing seems silly, but it was a hugely traumatic event at the time.

In case you’re wondering: IThe wig color looks fantastic, but I have not shaved my head yet.

I still owe an update on the ducks. Coming soon!

I had mostly forgotten about it until yesterday. Somehow, as I thought about the fact that I have not run in a week, the race sprang to the forefront of my mind. At first, I dismissed it. After all, I’ll never be able to PR considering the circumstances.

A few hours later, I got to thinking about it again. No, I didn’t develop some delusion that I could PR. I’m not even sure if I will be able to run the whole thing, but I did decide that I should run it. Or as much of it as possible anyway. I think it will be good for me to have a training goal, even if it is just to finish the 13.1 miles, and really, 13.1 miles is not all that far anyway. This should be totally doable.

So, there it is, I’ve put it out there and I’ve made up a very conservative training plan running three to four days per week. I think that four runs per week is an attainable goal, even on ’aftermath of chemo’ weeks.

As for this week of non-running, I think I just need to write it off and regroup this weekend. This week my hair has been playing games with me and, in an effort to preserve it until Chris gets home, I have been trying not to stress it at all. This means that running was out because my bouncing ponytail would rip it out unnecessarily before he got home. I was also nervous that the extra shower that running precipitates would cause even more hair loss. In an effort to regain control of my life and resume normal activities, I have determined that the hair has to go. In fact, I have decided that less hair should actually enhance my ability to run as I won’t have to deal with washing and drying it each time.

Ahhh, the silver lining. I knew there was a silver lining.

According to Runner’s World, here’s the plan for the next 10 days or so.

It is kind of a low ball plan, in the back of my mind I intend to be an overachiever and go a bit beyond this. I’ll let you know how that works out for me. Up until the hair loss thing stopped my running dead in its tracks, I was running quite a bit more than this plan calls for. In theory, one week off shouldn’t be a game changer.

For real, a duck update coming soon.

On a very positive note, I did not experience the extreme exhaustion that I did with the first round. The Sunday and Monday after round one it seemed like too much effort even to lay in bed. This time around I was an active participant in garage clean out day on Sunday and I was a productive member of the workforce on Monday.

On an equally negative note, I’m pretty sure that my hair is falling out, although it is not nearly as spectacular as I expected it to be. I imagined that it would leap off of my head en mass, maybe all at once under the pressure of the shower head or perhaps I would just wake up one morning with no hair. Instead, it seems to be taking its time, which is almost torturous and has left me torn between buzzing it all off to get it over with and holding out as long as possible to see if I don’t end up losing that much. I’m sure I’ll keep you posted, as I know that the world is dying to know the fate of my hair.

In all seriousness, I am trying to hold out until Friday to shave my head because Chris is off travelling the world again and I prefer to have him do it for me. We’ll see if my hair cooperates. If not, I’ll have to call in a substitute to wield the clippers because I don’t think I can bring myself to shave my own head. Not so surprisingly, the realization that my hair is falling out is equally, or even more distressing than hearing about the diagnosis in the first place.

Gross but true: I have been Googling ‘ABVD hair loss’ like it is my job and nearly all of the other victims seem to be disgusted by the massive shedding that typically ensues after the second treatment. Now for the gross part – I think Duke and our blue shag rug shed enough each day that I can’t even notice my hair adding to their daily dust bunnies. [Kai, if you read this someday, please know that I do put forth a huge effort to keep the floor that you roll around on clean.]

In other exciting news, it turns out that I am not super human as was evidenced by my white blood cell count on Friday. I was surprised as well. Seriously, I was. I assumed that they would check it and be amazed that my white blood cell count was practically normal. I figured the whole team of nurses would be totally in awe of my abundant neutrophils, but that’s not exactly how things went down.

Part of this whole chemo deal is getting your white blood cells (WBC) checked once per week. Unfortunately, mine have been trending downward even more than expected. Most people have between 4,000 and 10,000 per cubic millimeter. Two and a half weeks ago when I went in for my first treatment mine were over 8,000. One and a half weeks ago, on my off week, I was down to 4,000. When I went in for treatment on Friday, I was more in the neighborhood of 2,000; low enough that the nurses told me that they were surprised that the doctor let me do my treatment.

The upside of my crazy low WBC count is that I’m getting plenty of extra attention. I even scored a Sunday afternoon appointment for a Neupogen injection. Neupogen is a drug that can be used to help boost WBC production and I am lucky enough to get four of them this week. [Have I mentioned that I'm not a fan of needles?] On Friday I get to go back and find out how it worked. In the meantime I’m pretty nervous about this daycare drop off/pick up thing. That place has to be crawling with germs just waiting to wreak havoc on my nonexistent immune system.

As you might have gathered by now, I have been spending a lot of time in this place labeled ‘Cancer Center’. It is still pretty strange to me to be hanging around with cancer patients. I guess I am technically one of them, but I don’t really identify with that group. After all, cancer is something that happens to old people, sick people, other people, I don’t know, just not me. So, instead of including myself in that category, I will continue to attend treatment at the cancer center and I will continue to feel bad for all of those unfortunate people who got dealt a bad hand, but I won’t feel bad for me because I’m not one of them. I just happen to stop in there like six times per week.

All in all, aside from the hair issue, I suppose that things are going pretty well. I’m impressed with myself that I did not have any down days and just generally delighted that I did not feel exhausted in the same way that I did after the first round.

An update on the ducks is coming soon!

“You have some birds or something. You need to come pick them up.”

I’m so glad I didn’t put my phone number on the duckling order form. I was MIA at training all week, it would have been pretty interesting if I had needed to sneak out to get them.

So yeah, we have a lot of ducks now. 10 Black Crested Pekin, 9 Indian Runners, and 10 Cayuga. There was one casualty as the ducks made their way from Oakland, CA and Denver.

Chris made his way to the post office as quickly as possible to pick them up and get them settled into their new home. Thankfully, we spent most of Saturday getting ready for ducks. Kai got to go to one of Chris’ favorite stores of all time on Saturday, Rural King, where, ironically, there were plenty of ducks for sale.

Now we have a giant kiddie pool full of ducks in our garage. Who doesn’t, right? They seems to be pretty high maintenance so far. The wood shavings in their pool need to be changed daily, plus they seem to need fresh food and water twice per day. Even Duke just gets one feeding. [Duke free feeds, so it takes him about 24 hours to work through his bowl of food.] With Chris’ insane travel schedule, I am pretty sure that I will be quite ready for the ducks to move outside when the time comes. Of some consolation is the fact that Kai seems to be quite amused by watching the ducks. I’m glad that she appreciates them.

Come Sunday, things had changed. We planned to walk the same three miles with Kai and Bob and I didn’t even make it a quarter of the way around the loop walking before asking to turn back. I was wiped out. Wow.

Monday morning I thought that I should make an attempt to go to work. After struggling to make it through the getting ready process, I dragged myself to the car and went in. My ‘work day’ lasted about an hour, at which point I concluded that it was too much effort to sit in the chair and headed home.

I was exhausted and just all around crummy feeling. I felt an awful lot like I imagine that I would if I had stayed out drinking all weekend without any sleep. My brother, who once pledged a fraternity, can probably understand what I’m talking about. I gather from his stories that freshman year at Penn State was not as kind to him as it was to me.

By the time I made it home, I was freezing to death. No exaggeration. Anyway, my not even close to warm enough bed awaited me. I crawled in, with that chilled to the bone feeling that I can usually only achieve by night skiing in the bitter cold temperatures and unrelenting winds of Upstate New York while wearing clothing that is still damp with sweat from a day of riding. This was not a fulfilling experience at all.

I determined that I was far too cold and exhausted even to lay in bed. Unfortunately, I could not come up with a less energy intense alternative. Ugh. To be honest, I might have cried about it if that would not have required me to expend additional effort.

Somehow, I finally got to sleep. Six or seven hours later, I awoke from a deep sleep feeling kind of normal. I tested the waters by doing some chores, then decided to attempt a run.

I use that term very loosely. My ‘run’ was probably 60% run, 40% walk, but somehow, afterwards, I felt more normal than I had in days. In fact, it led to two subsequent, more legitimate, running attempts on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Thursday I planned to run also, but when I discovered that we could do this instead, all plans went out the window.

I think the thing that I am most impressed with myself about is that I got up an hour early on Friday morning to squeeze a run in. It made me remember why I like to run in the morning. Going to work on Friday is so much nicer when you know that you are off the hook and free to do as you please on Friday night. It was such a relief not to have a run looming over me all day. In fact, I just might try the same thing on Monday morning as well!

1. Chris was gone all week and these guys could have arrived while he was away. What the heck would I have done with 30 ducklings?
2. Chris has definite plans to travel in the future. I obviously have time to take care of ducks in addition to my normal daily activities. Riiiiigt.
3. I wouldn’t know what to do with a duckling if I had one.

Gosh, I hope he is here when they arrive.

I’m kind of regretting this decision.

Animal lovers: Not to worry, I will absolutely care for them no matter what, but perhaps I would have yet again vetoed the idea if I had thought through it more thoroughly. Buyers remorse anyone? And no, Chris doesn’t have it, he is still stoked.

I have said this before: Chris is fairly charming and he often influences people to do things that they wouldn’t normally agree to. Um, yeah, case in point.

It is like running through water. The first few steps of each run I feel amazing. Weightless. Like I am gliding effortlessly along. Then WHAM! Hello wall! I need to read up to understand exactly what I am experiencing here, but basically I seem to go from running easy to the feeling of trudging through a fluid far more viscous than air within a few minutes. I wonder if it has to do with my blood counts? Bio majors, feel free to weigh in!

For those of you who are running or have run while pregnant, it kind of reminds me of the last run that I did during my 34th week; much harder than I think it should be and littered with more walking than I would typically think acceptable.

I am doing my best to maintain perspective and I’m even trying not to get embarrassed when I walk up some of the big hills. [I'm using Kai and Bob as my excuse for needing to walk up hill. P.S. - Chris, Bob needs air in his tires still.] Nevertheless, I can’t help but demand more from myself. I can feel a huge improvement in my energy levels four days out from chemo versus three days out, so maybe the runs will return to the low end of the spectrum of normal runs as I get farther out from the last treatment and my blood counts hopefully approach reasonable levels. Either way, I’ve made it out three out of five days so far, so I at the very least I am collecting a lot of data points to draw conclusions from. For now I guess I just leave my watch home, run my favorite three miles untimed, and act satisfied with the effort.

This running for the sake of running, without regard for pace is such a huge paradigm shift for me that I’m having a lot of trouble coming to terms with it. [You noticed?] I’ll get there, no worries, give me some time.

All in all, I would say that it went pretty well. I did not get sick, which was huge. Going into this, I made sure that my bathroom floor was clean in case I ended up hanging out on it. So glad that I didn’t end up using it!

I would say that the biggest symptom that I faced was being extremely tired. Chris and I did make it out running on Saturday, but I came home and took a short nap straight away. Psychologically, the run was very important. Physiologically, the run may have been the tipping point to extreme exhaustion. You know when you are so worn out that your bones just feel hollow? Yeah, like that.

Sunday morning, of course, Kai wanted to get up bright and early, she doesn’t understand why I want to sleep so much. We made it through the day, Chris doing the bulk of the Kai care, but by 2 pm I could not believe that there were five plus hours until she might go to bed. I was toast.

As an escape, I cut our grass yesterday. It seemed like mowing would be easier than holding Kai for hours while Chris mowed. Although I wore SPF 30 sunblock on my face, I still burned. I was warned that I might be more photosensitive than usual, but I was surprised that it was something SPF 30 couldn’t handle. I’ll remember that for next time.

I’m relieved that things went fairly smoothly, hopefully things don’t get much worse with progressive treatments.