Cancer Perks

• When people post a photo of you with no hair (or a cute hat) on Facebook, you get a crazy number of "likes" 
• Sometimes people notice you're feeling unwell while waiting in line and insist on paying for your shopping (seriously, just happened to me today, a very sweet retired nurse whose husband is going through chemo too)
• You get to go to "cancer makeup class", get a bunch of fancy makeup you'd never buy yourself, and meet some other awesome women
• People give you special brownies, and show up at your door with scarves, chocolate, and wonder-woman underwear
• You get to spend lots of quality time catching up with your friends during chemo sessions; way easier than scheduling coffee dates with everyone
• A sore tongue (yes unfortunately it's back, although not as bad as before) gives you a guilt-free excuse to eat ice cream

No news is good news!

Nothing very exciting to report from this week's chemo appointment - no allergies (yay!), lovely company, really nice nurses as always.  The only annoyance was another loooooong appointment.  However, given that we got several dirty looks from people in various waiting rooms who seemed to be grumpy that we were having a fun time, and got to overhear multiple people complaining about how long they were waiting, and that the snow didn't start so our commute home was pretty brief, I can't complain.  

My friend Laura was with me and got to meet Dr. Kaplan, so she's now convinced that between my crush on him and Chris Hadfield, I have a thing for eloquent nerds.  She's probably right.  

Hoping for a better week with fewer cold symptoms and hopefully few chemo side-effects.  Wish me luck!

For Those Who Were Curious...

No allergic reaction to the Taxol thus far, but I've had a brutal cold all week that's been keeping me in bed watching Gilmore Girls reruns.  The kind of cold that, a few months ago, I would have completely ignored and now is kicking my ass.  Have I mentioned that I am pretty much all done with this chemo thing yet?  11 weeks and counting...

Short Interlude

This chemo thing is so weird.  

I keep thinking I’ll get more data as I go further through this, and then I’ll be more prepared and know what to expect, except every time is so different.  

This past session of AC I was just wrecked.  As in, it felt like a semi-truck rolled into me and kept right on going.  It’s not like it should be that surprising; but for someone who’s used to arranging multiple activities per day on the weekend because the kids and I really like to be out and about, it’s disconcerting to be able to manage about 30 minutes of playtime before needing want to go back to bed.  

However, I'm now officially DONE with AC!  And today (right now as I write this) I'm starting my new round of chemo, a drug called Taxol.  I'm here for a long time today because they're pumping me full of steroids and benadryl in case I get an allergic reaction and I get my first dose of herceptin too (also known as Trastuzumab, which sounds like a Romanian Vampire name to me, I love it).  I'm hoping that after the first couple treatments (12 in all, once per week) I'll have a better guess as to how I'll feel throughout, although of course given my AC experience you never know.

In the meantime, I brought my copy of Girls of Atomic City, which I'm reading for bookclub, along with me today, and had a long conversation with Dr. Kaplan about WWII.  I also learned that he served during the Vietnam War by working with a bunch of crazy smart cancer researchers here in the US.  They were told to go buy some uniforms at the store and when they found out they cost $300 they came back told their commander that he could buy them for them himself!  He said he didn't care so they spent the entire war doing research in their jeans.  And he says he's the only one who went on to actually practice medicine; everyone else he served with is running impressive medical research clinics all around the country.  I can say I'm officially glad he's decided to practice; this whole thing is much more feasible with good friends and good doctors to help me through.

That's it for today; hopefully I'll try to post this week and let folks know how Taxol is going.  Hope you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving and Channukah celebrations!

Soap Opera Style

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

___________________

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.