Day 276: It Feels Good to Feel Normal

I knew I was at Synergy when I woke up this morning, looked at my UP band and saw that I had only gotten 5.5 hours of sleep last night.

Though I was exhausted and really wanted to go back to sleep, I had to get over to the Orange County Convention Center to be immediately thrown into the fire.

Synergy keynote days are a blur for us between doing on-air interviews for SynergyTV, ensuring the Social Media Hub is running smoothly, monitoring tens of thousands of conversations, fielding questions from executives, working on real-time keynote video clips and a number of other projects…usually all at the same time.

Thankfully, I have an amazing team both onsite and offsite who help to ensure that everything stays in motion while I’m getting pulled in a hundred directions.

It was nice having my hunger start to come back today so I didn’t have to force myself to eat. The problem today was finding times to sneak away to eat.

I had a colleague of mine tell me how impressed he was with how I looked. He expected me to look different after everything that has happened.

It feels good to hear that colleagues, friends and family members are impressed with how I have progressed over the months, especially those who I haven’t seen since before the injuries.

While I don’t hide from what happened to me…in fact I’m quite open about it, I don’t want others to feel compelled to feel sorry for me based on how I look or what we’re going through.

As I have thought about that comment from my colleague throughout the day I have realized that it comes down to it feeling good to feel normal, even if I still have to take chemo for another 9 months.

I'm typing this while sitting downstairs with a few colleagues tackling final work for the day before crashing for a few hours and getting started all over again for yet another long day.

As the day winds down, though I’m exhausted now, I’m feeling strong. My body isn’t feeling fatigued from the last round of chemo.

Once we get past tomorrow, Thursday will be much easier since that’ll just be a full-day meeting followed by our closing night party.