One of the side-effects of chemotherapy can be what's called "chemo brain" - from what I gather, it's a loss of short-term memory and inability to think quickly on your feet. It can be a major issue or minor one, and can last just while you're having chemo, or months, years, or forever afterwards.
For the most part, I've been okay thankfully. I'm definitely tired and a little distracted, but nothing major. Then the other day I had my first total chemo brain moment. It was last Tuesday, and I was feeling okay enough to plan to go into work that day at least for a while.
In the morning, I take a bunch of pills, but the regimen changes over the course of the treatment (so it's different on day 1, 2, 10, etc.) I'd gotten up, and Ethan was hanging out in bed with me, and I reached over to grab my ibuprofen, which is in a prescription bottle because after my surgery was over I'd refilled the prescription-grade ibuprofen with the regular over the counter stuff. I took three pills, swallowed them, said something to Ethan, then looked back at my nightstand, and somehow became convinced that I'd taken the wrong medicine.
At first I was sure I'd taken some anti-nausea medicine, of which I'm supposed to take 3 pills over the course of 24 hours, so I freaked out. Now I should point out that the ibuprofen is in a bottle that is tall, skinny, orange, and has a white lid. The anti-nausea medicine, on the other hand, is in a bottle that is squat and white with a blue lid. There's no way I confused them. But that didn't stop me from running downstairs to find Jeff and scream that I needed to make myself throw up but didn't know how. So he told me, and I proceeded to try to throw up for maybe 5 minutes. I failed miserably.
Then I went back upstairs to try to see if maybe this had been a horrible mistake, and instead concluded that rather than take 3 anti-nausea pills, I had taken 3 sleeping pills instead (these at least were in a similar container, but they are tiny compared to the ibuprofen so it's pretty impossible that I had mistaken one for the other). At which point I started screaming, "I have to give an fucking exec presentation in an hour and a half and I just fucking took 3 sleeping pills!", ran downstairs, and tried to throw up again. And failed.
Why all the running up and down? Why all the swearing? I promise I am normally quite calm in a crisis. But I blame I Chemo Brain (tm).
Anyway, the story ends just fine - I went back upstairs, and conveniently the lid to the ibuprofen has a timer on it that tells you how long its been since the bottle was opened. I looked more carefully since I'd concluded I was just going to have to spend the next 24 hours in bed and noticed that the timer said 7 minutes. So it turned out I'd taken the ibuprofen after all.
And the presentation went just fine. The End.
Looking forward to another installment of Chemo Brain? Don't worry, I'm sure I'll have more to share.
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