We have been trying to plan a small vacation. The operative phrase here is “small.”

A friend of ours is getting married in August in a Monday evening cere­mony in the Cincinnati area. That means an overnight stay and puts us about 120 miles south of our front door. At the end of the same week, we need to be in Chicago for two nights of concerts, including a world premiere.

Those two events, bookends to the week, pretty much chop the work week into little tiny pieces. So why not take the week off and travel a bit?

I want to. Except when I don’t.

For much of June, I traced routes in the road atlas. Cincinnati to Knoxville to Chattanooga to Shiloh, then up the Mississippi River past St. Louis and on into southern Illinois. Springfield, then Chicago.

That route would be over 1,300 miles, or a little over half the distance to Portland, Oregon, from our door­step. And that doesn’t count the return trip of 300 miles from Chicago.

My fingers would stutter on the atlas. What if I got tired? What if I got sick?

What if I disappointed myself?

I would set the atlas aside for a few days until my husband Warren would ask, “So any more thoughts about vacation?” I would give some vague reply that fooled neither of us. I was dithering on the decision.

Don’t get me wrong. I love to travel. I mean, really love to travel. I come by it honestly: I am the daughter of a man who loved getting out of our small town and seeing as much of the country as he could. Yellowstone Park, Expo ’68 in Montreal, New England, California. Not bad for a young blue collar machinist, his even younger wife, and their four kids. These were all car trips, and we camped as we went. As a law student, following in my dad’s footsteps, I could and did on more than one occasion drive nonstop, door-to-door, from Portland, Oregon, to Delaware, Ohio, in 48 hours.

Those were some pretty intense road trips, even by my childhood standards.

So what am I doing in 2014, looking at the atlas and balking?

I know why. I am presently undergoing treatment with Revlimid ^[1] (lenalidomide). After five full courses, about to begin the sixth, the lab results are good. (We’ll overlook the fact that my myeloma often presents well in labs while flying below the radar and doing damage to my body.) But the Revlimid is wearing on me physically, and exhaustion, frequently followed by low-grade fevers and feeling sick, is an increasingly constant com­panion.

A consistent thread picked up by many of the columnists for The Myeloma Beacon is the toll myeloma ex­tracts from each of us. It wears us down. It demands much of patient and caretaker alike. It forces us to de­cide between courses of treatment that could kill us and a cancer that most certainly will kill us.

Must it take my vacation too?

I hate shaping my life around the threats of myeloma: the threat of illness, the threat of exhaustion, the threat of not being able to do the things I want to do. I am willing to concede some ground when necessary, but not willing to scrap every last activity until it is absolutely necessary.

On the other hand, I knew deep in my heart and in the pit of my stomach that I was not up for that kind of in­tense traveling in such a short time frame.

As it turns out, after the recent Fourth of July holiday weekend, my vacation conundrum solved itself. Our local symphony (and hence my husband, and by extension our household) had two concerts that weekend, one here in Delaware, Ohio, on the 4th, and the other on a Lake Erie island on the 5th.

The afternoon stage setup and late night on the 4th led to an exhausted start to the 5th for me. (Never mind the tree branch I walked into the morning of the 5th, gashing my scalp and nose.) A long, long day and night on the 5th led to my being utterly done in. I didn’t do any heavy lifting either of those days, but I did plenty of other tasks.

By the morning of the 6th, when I woke up, I was beat. I was way past beat. I was sick-crawl-into-the-corner beat. Not that I didn't have a good time (well, the tree was no fun). The weather and the concerts and the friends were great. Just spectacular. But I was beat.

Although it wasn’t pleasant being that worn out, it served a purpose. I could now look at those earlier va­ca­tion plans, the ones I could not commit to, toss them, and start all over again.

We could head west from Cincinnati to Columbus, Indiana, and then on to Springfield, Illinois. Tour the Dana House (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), and then Lincoln’s tomb, before driving north to Chicago. This route eliminates about half the miles and puts us in Chicago midweek. The whole trip fits better within the parameters of the week and the parameters of my life. And I’m not dithering anymore.

When I floated the idea to Warren, he immediately agreed.

So that’s the plan. And here’s the lesson I learned from that glorious holiday weekend.

If I am going to do a bigger vacation, I need more downtime built into the vacation. I need to rest and renew myself. I need to give myself permission to take it easier on myself and my body. I don’t need to sit at home and waste away, but I do need to acknowledge that life is different.

There is a fabulous ice cream parlor in Columbus, Indiana, that I can’t wait to sample.

Some things never change.