A belated Happy New Year! Today I return from a three week break, the longest break I have had in years.
I shouldn’t be surprised that I felt so truly relaxed last night, just prior to reading the backlog of emails and writing this blog. For the final week of the break we chose a holiday that would require us to do little more than simply turn up each day. We went cruising. It was my first time and I will admit I wasn’t dying to try it. We chose it because we thought our teenage sons would love it (and they did). The added bonus was it was also the most relaxing holiday I have ever taken, without eventually becoming bored.
When my children were younger I split my four-weeks of annual leave evenly across the four school holiday periods, like many working parents do. A week here and there is nowhere near enough. I find it difficult to wind down and just when I do, I have to wind myself back up.
One of the reasons cruising was so blissfully stress-free was that there was limited Internet access for the entire holiday. Even the $65/minute access fee (or something as outrageous as that) was frustratingly slow. So we agreed to go without for a week. It was tough for us all. My husband is a journalist and news junkie and we were on an American ship, so no chance of gaining any information about Australian events. Our sons are teenagers whose iPhones are virtually glued to their palms and I publish websites for a living and communicate with my friends via specific Facebook groups.
It was surprisingly easy for us to let go of the technology. When your days are packed with great reading, swimming, laughing, dancing, great shows and wonderful food there’s no time for tweeting and Facebook-ing. We were crowned trivia champions and found ourselves reluctant participants in an all-in game show while enjoying a quiet cocktail in a bar, but we went with it and had one of the funniest evenings of our lives. We may have missed the news but were pleased to escape last week’s heat wave and virtually everything in our lives that causes us stress, for just one week.
I discovered a lump the size of a golf ball in my breast a few weeks before Christmas. Apparently the culprit is stress. By Christmas Eve, my final day in the office, that lump was causing me excruciating pain. I didn’t do anything about this lump until it suddenly became distressing because it’s a recurring condition that to date has been diagnosed as a collection of the world’s largest cysts. I have had the things aspirated on at least three occasions previously.
Today I am booked in for a quick aspiration of my current cyst. It was the earliest booking I could get post Christmas. However, my stress-free cruise holiday appears to have dealt with the worst of the cyst. It hasn’t completely disappeared. Apparently they never do. But it has reduced in size and there is no longer pain. In fact I don’t recall experiencing pain during the entire trip – which is amazing because I could barely sleep on my side during that Christmas week. I wondered how I would be able to deal with the pain until my appointment this morning.
And so I am left with an appointment for a mammogram and aspiration that will probably (hopefully) reveal a relatively large cyst that is happy to sit there minding its own business for the time being, at least until I work myself into a stress frenzy again. I refer to my largest cyst as my warning sign. It tells me loud and clear (and even flashes red) when I need a break. It’s my built-in alarm.
Does your body throw out a signal when it’s time to slow down? Do you heed the warning?