As I physically recover from chemo and surgery, I find myself back at the beginning – that is back at that place pre-treatment where I struggled to focus on any one particular task. I have a list a mile long of things I want to do, but I don’t seem to have the ability to focus. I have a whole new respect for one of my colleagues in the PhD program who started her PhD a few months after cancer treatment. I cannot imagine navigating through epistemologies with chemo brain!

It is amazingly difficult to read academic articles. The topics are interesting and the articles are said to be “easy” to read articles, but still, my focus just isn’t there yet. I cannot seem to sit for more than 10 minutes unless I’m writing – for some reason, blogging is something I can do for longer stretches of time. Perhaps that is because it is something I never stopped doing?

So, for now, I’m operating in triage mode. I’m doing the things that are most urgent and need to get done. I’m using deadlines to drive what I do. I know, some people operate like this every day. I didn’t used to. I was always the pro-active one – the one that got the assignment done or paper written the week before it was due. I handed things in early. That was me. But right now, I’m just holding my head up above the water to get done what must be done and not a whole lot extra!