My doctors told me I could return to strength training, so I have. However, it looks a lot different now.

Before cancer and brain surgery, I was deadlifting 150 pounds and benching 125.

Now, I stick to bodyweight exercises, and the heaviest weight I use is an 8-pound kettlebell. Before, my sessions lasted a full hour; now, they’re thirty minutes.

But here’s the thing: I’m exhausted when each session ends and sore for days.

This week, I decided to do a 30-minute session the day after an immunotherapy treatment. In the moment, it felt good. I worked up a sweat and finished feeling strong and clear. Later that night, though, I woke up around 11 p.m. with sharp pain in my lower left ribs—or maybe it was my lung? (Honestly, I can’t always tell the difference.) The pain and the scare were enough to land me in the ER from midnight until four in the morning.

(Pulmonary embolism is a potential side effect of my treatments, so any chest pain or difficulty breathing gets a lot of caution. As it should.)

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t a pulmonary embolism. It might’ve just been a pulled muscle.

It’s hard growing into a new body. Learning new limits. I’m not always great at resisting the urge to compare myself to who I was before or judging where I am now. And I’m definitely not above feeling embarrassed for panicking over what turned out to be a minor setback.

Living with cancer amplifies everything—the small things, like how much I love the taste of ketchup, and the big things, like listening to my body, asking questions, getting help, and finding ways to calm myself down.

Moving forward, I’ll keep reminding myself, “8 is great” whenever I reach for a kettlebell—or even, “5 and I’m alive.”