Soap Opera Style

Oops - this one never got posted; it's from a couple weeks ago so please read with that in mind!

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I’ve told a few people this story but thought it was amusing (and short!) enough to write down.  While I was in the hospital we figured out that one medication, Lorazepam, that I’d been taking at night to help me sleep also helps a lot with my nausea, so I ended up taking it during the day last time the week after chemo, and will again this week.  However, while I knew that it was useful for anxiety, sleeplessness, and also nausea, I didn’t know that it could also give you mild amnesia. 

So I happily took it, thrilled that the combo of my reduced chemo dose plus the Lorazepam helped me feel better.  I also went to work, and sat through 4 hours of storyboard reviews on Wed and again on Thurs.  It turns out that this was an ineffective combination. 

On Monday I went back to work and started talking to people on my team about the storyboard reviews, but I quickly realized that I remembered the room we were sitting in, and remembered starting a question and having no idea where to go from there, but I couldn’t remember anything else we’d discussed AT ALL. 

My friend Alyssum pointed out that I was now completely ready to join the storyline of a Soap Opera with my handy amnesia – all I need is an evil twin, or a daughter I didn’t know I had, or to marry my husband’s brother by mistake.  I’m looking forward to figuring out what I forget this next week.  Please keep me posted!

Chemo Blues

When I try to describe myself during somewhat annoying personality-quiz like management training classes, “happy” always makes the list.  It might be accompanied by words like witty, snarky, smart, impatient, effervescent, etc., but happy is always there.  Which is a bit of a problem these days because it means that I don’t really have the equipment to deal with depression. 

 

One of the less fun side-effects of chemo, aside from raging mouth sores which are thankfully not making a prominent recurrence at the moment, is what I call the “chemo blues”.  It’s not a deep depression, but it’s just a level of gloom that permeates everything from about the Wed-Sun after each treatment.  Given how things are going in my life, and in all my friends’ lives, there is reason to be bummed out, but this is something that feels unnatural.  Half my brain is busy being very sad at everything, and very emotional, while the other half of my brain is busy being disdainful of the first half, saying things like, “God you are boring as fuck!”. 

 

Then I magically get better, sometime on Sunday afternoon.  And all of a sudden the next chemo dose seems completely manageable and life, while rocky, seems hopeful again.  It’s surreal.  I’m guessing it’s also how many people feel all the time. 

 

Today’s my last dose of AC chemo before I move onto the easier Taxol.  Hopefully this will be my last week of firsthand experience with the Chemo Blues.  But I hope I can remember this the next time I’m talking to someone who’s feeling down, and have more empathy for what they’re going through.  I can’t fix it, but at least I can understand. 

Randomized Ice Cream Trial

My Doctor has placed me on a randomized trial today - will I spend my chemo session sucking on ice cubes, or downing Tillamook chocolate ice cream?  Only time will tell.

Let's back up for a second - last week was great; I felt strong and healthy almost all week, except for the time when I thought it would be a good idea to go for a long walk with Ethan, and then even though I was really tired and wanted to call Jeff to pick us up half-way through, I decided that I could "push through it".  Turns out you can't "push through it" with chemo side effects.  Also the fact that we got lost in the woods near our house on the way home and were trailblazing probably didn't help.  But otherwise, last week was good.  I was able to be at work most of the week and catch up on things, I played with the kids, and I was able to eat acidic foods without wanting to curl into a ball. 

So today I'm at Swedish waiting for my next chemo dose.  We're going to lower my dosage by 15% in the hopes that that prevents some of the side effects while still being effective, but I'd also heard about people sucking on ice chips during chemo to help prevent mucositis (by the way, do not do a Bing search of that because the images that come up in the main search results are really horrifying) which sounded like magic mumbo-jumbo but I thought I might as well talk to my doctor about it. 

(Geeky aside: A friend had mentioned that he'd heard about an application of this to prevent hair loss, where you could basically ice your head to keep from losing your hair.  I was imagining a Jetson-like hair salon with big hoods with pumping cooling fluid.  Turns out that people usually use dry ice, although Dr. Kaplan did a study with a pharmaceutical company that was making special helmets you could pump through but (a) it doesn't really seem to work except possibly in cases where people were getting chemo drugs that only sometimes make you lose your hair (not applicable for me) and (b) Dr. Kaplan is not psyched about it anyway because it prevents chemo from going to the outside of your head, which means that it's not fighting any cancer there.  Note that breast cancer can move to your skin, but doesn't move to your mouth.   Either way, I am kind of a fan of my bad-ass bald look so I would be skipping that regardless.)

It turns out that, if this ice thing works, it works by constricting the blood vessels in your mouth so that you don't end up with as much chemo getting absorbed.  That actually makes sense, but they don't have any hard data on how effective it is; hence the planned randomized ice cream trial, because at least then there would be the positive side effect of ice cream.