After a couple of really down weeks where I was sleeping 12 hours a
night and generally feeling pretty ill I took a chance and went with my
partner and his parents to Las Vegas for a short week.  I had a great
time, had a lot more energy than I thought I would.  What a freaking
weird place that is.  

It's Friday night and I'm about to jab myself with shot # 23 out of 24.  
Did the previous one on a Thursday so that I'd have more energy to
travel on Monday.  Flew back today.

Stress for me is the main destroyer of energy so I kept a low dose of
Xanax going the whole week (my father-in-law can be work to deal with
sometimes.)  One night I took a Marinol (once I was back at the hotel)
but otherwise was cannabis-free.  

It's amazing to me how much this tx turns mental states into physical
states.  I can spend two hours on the phone with work trying to get
people to understand what they're doing wrong and it kills me for the
rest of the day.  Actually, any sort of mental exertion is really
tiring, even simple stuff like paying bills.  This last week I only did
things I enjoyed and being in Las Vegas doesn't really require much
thought.  I had energy from 8 in the morning until 8 or 9 at night.  
Even did a little hiking on the day we drove out into the desert.  
That's always been one of my favorite things and it made me really happy
to be doing it.  Moved at my own pace, sometimes just sat and watched
other people gamble, even made a few hundred playing blackjack.  I'm not
much of a gambler and don't usually have good luck.  I guess this is
payback.

I even had a glass of wine with dinner on Thursday.  I figure if it
would make a difference at this point I'm already f.cked so I went for
it.  Pinot Noir, it was SO GOOD.

In terms of sharing experiences with tx, I discovered that when I did
non-stressful non-thinking activities I was actually able to enjoy them
a lot more than I would have predicted.  Most of the things I did I
would probably have turned down had they been local activities, and
before I went we worked out that I might have to stay in the hotel, or
just go out half-days, which didn't happen.  I felt that background
yuckiness all the time that made me feel draggy but I just offered it up
and when I felt the crankiness I kept my mouth shut when I didn't have
anything nice to say.   I was sort of surprised that the slow steady
activity didn't make me feel any worse all day (in the same way that a
midday nap doesn't make me feel any better) and caffeine, which I avoid
at home, really helped a lot.  I had a double espresso every afternoon
and I sailed through the rest of the day.  What I thought was just going
to be meeting family obligations was in fact fun.  

I wonder if some of the fear that activity would make me feel worse
actually has been the cause of my feeling worse (because of the
mental-to-physical thing) and when I was in a place where I was highly
distracted (and Las Vegas is nothing but distraction) I forgot about the
fear and lost some of the discomfort.  I'm also very happy about being
close to being done with treatment and I haven't done anything fun in
months, so I had a great attitude.

So in hindsight, I wish I had tried to push myself a little bit to do
fun things in the past few months that I didn't think I was up for,
because my fear of crashing out badly didn't happen this last week.  To
be fair to myself I did go to on a trip during week 5 or 6 where I
wasn't able to do much of anything at all so who knows.  

Tired and rambling....