Careful Planning Meets Chaos Theory

When Chaos Theory first became widely discussed years ago, there was a quick and dirty example of it that made the rounds: Chaos Theory can be illustrated as your typical day. You wake up in the morning with a certain plan or pattern for your day. You have places to be and tasks that need to be accomplished and you think that they can all fit into your day. Then your day happens.

As you get dressed, your shoelace breaks and you realize you don’t have any spares. You unthread one from another pair of shoes and go to make breakfast. You find that someone has used the last of the ground coffee and you have to grind some. There is no orange juice for your smoothie, so you have to hustle up some English muffins for breakfast. You find that the deli meat and tomato you were going to use for your lunch sandwich are gone and that means you have to buy something for lunch. All this combines to get you out the door a touch late and there is a bus stall on your way to work. You are late to work and that pushes back your first meeting. The meeting runs long. There is not enough time to complete the spreadsheet work you were going to do before you need to check in with the contractor working on the office. Lunch gets pushed back and you have to take additional time to go out and get food. All this shortens your afternoon and you absolutely have to be at little league practice (you’re the coach) or 16 kids will be standing around. Etc, Etc, Etc. By the end of the day, the resemblance to your morning plan may be only a passing one.

The same thing occurs when you attempt to plan your activities around your treatment regimen. Chaos has the same domino-like effect. It ambushed me just two days ago.

I had a fairly heavy day at work, packing and moving many boxes of books, rearranging inventory and working through floor plans for a 400,000-book sale. I felt all right when I got home, but I realized I had pushed it and decided to stay home instead of making a run to my studio. I knew that my wife worked late the next day and I could handle what I needed to do tomorrow evening. At 1:30 a.m. that night however, tired as I was, I was wide awake. I had to get some sleep and broke down and took a Trazadone. I took about an hour to work, so I managed to get 4 hours of sleep and woke up with a logy feeling from the sleeping pill. By the time I got home after work, I went right to bed and slept for 3 hours. I was still tired enough that I went to bed early and slept for 8 hours (as treatment veterans know, 8 hours sleep can be a miracle). I did not even manage to get much done at work much less do any of the small tasks I had hoped to accomplish in the evening. The lack of accomplishment that day affected the next and it is only now that I can plan to get what I wanted to do yesterday done tomorrow evening, if all goes well.

Planning is good, lists are good, notes to yourself to remember that you forget are good, but the best-laid plans can definitely be put paid by a bout of treatment-derived chaos…