The Sun Is Setting

Yesterday, I slept the whole day and the only time I was awake for a short time was to take lunch and dinner. Later the night, I took a sleeping pill to ensure that I had a good night's rest. I woke up at 10am this morning, still feeling very sleepy and tired. I had overestimated my own ability in this trip to India. I was living in past glory and the traveling from place to place with only a day or two rests in between. This pace was too challenging for me. I did not pace myself well. I have also put my friends into a position where they had to worry about me too. I have only completed 50% of my pilgrimage journey. I did have a change of routine but instead also found myself under stress instead of relaxing. In future, I will take a different approach when drawing up traveling plans. If I had future opportunities, I would visit India again because there are a few more places that I want to visit.

Now that my 'holiday' is over, the immediate focus is on my legs. Tomorrow, I will go to the hospital to do a scan on my left leg around the knee cap area. It's giving me a lot of pain and I am hoping that it is nothing more than an old wound. 12 years ago, I missed a step and fell on my knee cap. My leg was swollen for almost one month and after a few sessions of acupuncture, the pain went away. As for my right leg, this is due to the bulging disc of my L4/L5 Lumbar spine. While on a domestic flight from Varanasi to New Delhi, I saw an advertisement on the inflight magazine about a surgery called Band Aid Surgery. This is a minimal invasive form of surgery. I was wondering why my orthopedic surgeons did not tell me about this surgery which is also available for my condition?

I have two things on my mind at the moment. The first is my pair of legs. Mobility is very important to me and when I was in India, I had used a walking stick for the first time in my life to assist me in walking. I realised that with whatever little time I had left, I need to have a good pair of legs so that I could do what ever I want to do. The second is my HIFU surgery in China next month. Although this palliative surgery cannot cure me of cancer, I am hopeful that my body will benefit from one big tumor less and free my right kidney from the tumor.

I believe 2012 will be a year where I spent more of my time in hospitals. I think I will also try more alternative therapies. I have identified a couple of them and now doing more reading. But all these will only happen after I settled my legs and kidney tumor surgery first. If there are opportunity for  travel, I would also consider it but it would not be a challenging one.