What was I thinking?

I’ve been home for a week now, after an intense seven days of conferencing in Halifax, and then a few more to spend time with my family. With a decent week of rest and sleep under my belt, I woke up this morning smiling as the thought, What was I thinking? ran through my brain about working at this level less than eight weeks post-surgery. I mean, really?

To her credit, my surgeon specifically scheduled my surgery so that I would be recovered enough to run my annual conference. We had talked about it from my early diagnosis, so she knew it was a milestone to me. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to have to disrupt my team. It was more that I wanted to show myself that this diagnosis wouldn’t interrupt my world — again.

Do as I say, not as I do

Of course, that idea is illogical. A colorectal cancer diagnosis and robotic right hemicolectomy ought to disrupt your world, and I did let it shape my schedule through appointments, scans, surgery, and four days in the hospital. In all, I was off work for a week.

But then I was back at my desk, ramping up for my conference with my volunteer team. Because that’s who I am, apparently.

Here’s the thing about being an Executive Director for a non-profit and an athlete: you get very good at pushing through. You learn to override signals. Discomfort gets filed under “manageable,” and you keep moving because there are deadlines to meet. That skill serves me well in a lot of contexts. Post-surgical recovery is not one of them.

Sometimes sleep is my job

I didn’t really understand how depleted I was until my Garmin told me in plain numbers.

Before surgery, my body battery — Garmin’s metric built from heart rate variability, sleep quality, and stress — routinely peaked in the 80s and 90s. My resting heart rate sat in the low-to-mid 50s. Those are athletic baselines. That’s what I’m working with when I’m well.

The rebuild from my April surgery was slow and real. By post-op Day 23, my body battery finally cracked 93. I wrote in my notes that morning: woke up feeling like myself. It took three weeks to get there.

By the time I left for Halifax on Day 39, my RHR was consistently in the low-to-mid 50s. I knew I was spending cycles in conference prep, but I was waking up with battery readings in the 50s and 60s. It still felt like rebuilding.

And then the conference started:

• Day 40 — first full day of conference mode, body battery 21, RHR 62. My notes from that day say: body battery crashing by mid-afternoon, but I feel OK. That last sentence is doing a lot of work.
• Day 43 — I had had a solid seven hours of sleep, and my battery was only at 29.
• Day 44 — six hours of sleep, battery 25.
• Day 46 — battery 21.
• Day 47 — two days before the end — battery 20, RHR still elevated at 67. I wrote: need recharging.
• Day 51 — the trip home told the full story: head cold, travel legs, bathroom runs in the middle of the night, battery at 32. I noted: BB at 32 this am, shows the story. Yes. It did.

The floor I had spent six weeks carefully building up? Gone in a week.

The other side

I’ve spent this last week doing almost nothing, and letting my body catch up to what I put it through. Day 56 — yesterday — I woke up with a battery of 92 and an RHR of 54. Today it’s 86. Now I’m recovered. Eight weeks post-surgery, with one week of enforced rest after a conference I had no business running at that intensity.

My body knew the whole time. I just wasn’t listening.

What I’m learning? Recovery is work.

Here’s what I’ve been sitting with since I got home.

One of the reasons the conference mattered so much to me — and I’m only seeing this clearly now, from the other side of a recovery week — is that I wanted to prove I was on the other side of this second cancer diagnosis. I wanted to stand at the front of my peers, competent and present, and signal to myself: this is behind me.

But I’m not on the other side. Not yet.

I’m only in the middle of it. Fifty-some days post-surgery, with a follow-up appointment next week, a colonoscopy on the horizon, a surveillance schedule being built, a body still doing the patient, unglamorous work of healing from the inside out. The cancer itself is gone — Stage I, clear margins, no nodes, NED — but the chapter isn’t closed. It’s still being written.

It’s a lot like a training plan. You hit a milestone and think, ‘dI’ve got this!’ and you push farther. Then, on race day, you discover skipping that taper was a bad idea.

That’s basically what I did — surgery done, scans clear, approved by my surgeon to go to Halifax — I sprinted towards normal before normal was actually available. You can want so badly to not be a cancer patient that you perform recovery instead of doing it.

I performed recovery for ten days in Halifax. My Garmin knew better.

Real recovery is a work in progress

The smart move — the runner’s move, honestly — is to treat recovery the way you treat training. You don’t rush basebuilding because you’re impatient for the race. The base is the work. The sleep is the work. The quiet weeks at home where nothing dramatic happens? Those are the weeks that make everything else possible.

I know this. I write about it. I’m apparently still learning it.

Next week I’ll see my surgeon. I’m going to ask about returning to running — carefully, incrementally, the right way. I’ll be walking the Brave Like Gabe 5K that morning, not racing it, and I’m genuinely at peace with that. The pace isn’t the point right now. Being there is.

I’m not on the other side yet. But I’m getting there. And this time, I’m going to let the getting-there take as long as it takes.