I have successfully returned to work, which I'm pleased to say has been going really well. It was pretty overwhelming on the first day and I did cry within the first hour! Thankfully my lovely colleague Celena was on hand to mop up my tears, ply me with tea and to firmly tell me not to overdo it. I think what hit me the hardest was that it initially didn't feel the same as it had done pre-treatment. I had a panicky moment of "Is this the right thing to do? Should I just accept that I don't have the stamina now and quit?" But thankfully after spending a few days teaching alongside our amazing supply music teacher Isobel and doing a very gentle phased return to work, I soon felt a lot more confident and able to take on more responsibility as the week progressed. It was also just lovely to see all the staff and students again after such a long time off.
I'm pleased to report that I'm now teaching my normal timetable again, just as I did pre-treatment and although it is still too tiring to do much after a day of teaching, (thank goodness for freezer meals!) things are going well and hopefully will continue to do so.
Fatigue and my inability to accept it, is quite a big issue at the moment. I am trying to learn to listen to my body more, but it's easy to overdo it when I'm seemingly feeling great. I learnt the hard way about overdoing it through an experience I had after I joined my local MS support group. I am very lucky to have a group who meet regularly only 5 minutes down the road from me. The group is run by lots of very lovely volunteers who support the local MS community. The group hosts chair-based yoga/physio sessions each week, run by a guy called Phil who has MS himself.
Unfortunately, the first week I went to the group I completely underestimated just how hard chair yoga actually is. As we started the session, I honestly thought to myself "This is great! All seems nice and easy, this will be a doddle if the whole hour is like this!" But no, that was just the warm up, and the moves got harder and harder. Phil was fab and did three different levels for each of the moves. I foolishly assumed I was fine to do the hardest each time as both ladies on either side of me seemed to be managing them fine. As one lady was in a wheelchair and the other had a walker I also stupidly assumed that anything they could do, I could surely do more easily? HA! What a fool.
What I had neglected to realise was that both of these lovely ladies were absolute PROS at chair yoga. Like, scarily good. No missing out moves or becoming unbalanced for them, no no! Little beginner chair-yogi me was doing my best to keep up with a pair of yoga gurus. A bit like signing up for the advanced yoga class when you've never done it before! So there I was, getting myself tied up in knots and slipping off the chair while the others were grace and fluidity personified. Oh the shame!
So unsurprisingly I completely overdid it, and ached for several days after. I also learnt a very hard lesson about doing too much too soon.
I felt like such a muppet and found it difficult to deal with until I returned to the class the week after, not to join in (I figured just walking to the class was PLENTY enough exercise that day!) but to talk to the others and to Phil. They all reminded me that things for me have changed now and will continue to change as my body adapts to the treatment I've had. Phil said to me the most important thing I think I've heard yet - MS is a marathon and not a sprint.
It's all about learning your limits and pacing yourself. Part of my problem is that I still have a lot of denial about my limits, for example I consider my balance to be pretty normal. But yet based on my results on the Wii fit it's equal to that of someone twice my age.
There have been two occasions recently that I'm not proud of where I have actually made myself tired to the point of sickness as sometimes with tiredness comes dizzy spells and poor vision. Not handling energy levels appropriately has meant that I've missed out on two family weekends because I've overdone it. The only things that revives me in those moments is to submit to the fatigue for a day (at worst two) and then I feel fine. Unfortunately I'm still of the mindset that it means I'm back to normal so I prance around doing too much and not letting anyone tell me otherwise and so the cycle begins again!
I'm slowly (very slowly) learning that I NEED to plan ahead and prioritize, and that it's actually incredibly detrimental to my recovery to keep doing this. This is something that is particularly important for my work this term. Term 5 is notoriously busy with coursework deadlines, mock exams, recitals and last minute revision sessions. My various bosses have been brilliant at helping me return to work but I've been reminded this week that I must NOT try to be superwoman. My biggest priority is simply keeping myself well, stopping this ridiculous cycle of "ooh yay energy let's do everything now.....oops I've wrecked my body" and generally being sensible. And I shall definitely be trying to do this.
C x
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