Mar. 8: They don’t tell you everything

Before I started chemotherapy, I knew I could plan on a few sure things: baldness, nausea, and fatigue. But there are so, so many other things that happen to a person during chemo that the doctors, nurses and a lot of books fail to mention. How did I find out about these things? When they happened to me. About a week after my first treatment I started noticing stuff going on with my body that I had not expected, stuff that made me go WTF, CANCER??? The baldness isn’t humiliating enough?

• For the first few days after each chemo treatment, everything that comes out of me is toxic. They say I’m supposed to flush twice, clean around the toilet with antibacterial stuff every time I use it, wash my hands eleventy times, etc. Why do I need to clean all around the toilet? I don’t dance while I’m sitting on it. I just sit. It’s insanity, I tell you. As far as the hand-washing, I do that like an OCD freak anyway, so no changes there. The one fun thing about being toxic is threatening to spit on people for those few days.
• My vision has gone all wonky. It comes and goes, the wonky-ness, but I can almost always count on it being bad. And the worst part is that sometimes it’s far-sightedness, and sometimes it’s near-sightedness—it’s inconsistent and annoying as hell. One minute I can’t read street signs or see my kid in his school play. Next, I can’t read the newspaper or focus on the computer screen. See? Annoying. As. Hell.
• Have you ever heard of chemo brain? I hadn’t. It’s totally a thing, though. Forgetfulness, stupidity, loss of the ability to speel words correlcty… I do not enjoy this one bit. I think chemo brain is similar to pregnancy brain or mom brain, but I don’t remember because I’m a dummy now.
• My skin is drier than normal, but not all over. It’s dry in patches. I’ve never had this problem in my life.
• Ugh, don’t get me started on my manicure. My fingernails have begun to bend at the tips. This is usually hereditary and/or a sign of low calcium, but even as I guzzle gallons of milk, it just gets worse. They’re also striped now—you can read my fingernails for my chemo schedule, just like a tree for its age. And then there are my cuticles—dry and hangnail-y like never before. I rub Bag Balm on them every night, but by morning you can barely tell. That could be because the cat loves the taste of Bag Balm, but I’m still blaming the chemo drugs. Oh, and professional manicures and artificial nails are out of the question—too much risk of infection.
• Approximately two weeks after each chemo, my neck and chest break out with an acne-like rash. I’ve bitched about this in recent weeks because I’ve never had an acne problem, EVER. It disappears right after each treatment and then comes back again about a week later. Fun! And so pretty!
• Yeah, they tell you your hair’s gonna fall out, but you kind of assume it’s just your long, flowing tresses that you’ll lose. Then one day you look in the mirror and see that girl in high school who shaved her eyebrows off for no apparent reason but she looks psychotic and everyone suddenly suspects she’s the one who pooped in the gym shower. Losing your eyebrows sucks BIG. Eyelashes too. The hair loss on the rest of my body, I’m not complaining about—that kind of maintenance I do not miss. But the eye hair! I curse the missing eye hair!
• The hair on my head did not come out at its roots—oh no, that would be too clean. Instead, it broke. It broke off right near the skin, but left a teensy root, like a practical joke played by Paul Mitchell himself. What this means is that my head is not smooth-bald, it’s stubbly-bald. Stubble is sexy on some guys, but not on my head. Worse yet is that between each treatment, the hair begins to grow back… and then breaks off again. I wonder if God gets a huge kick out of this. Someone must. It sure ain’t me.
• Don’t get me started on what chemo, pain meds, and anti-nausea stuff do to one’s digestive system.
• I’ve read in every cancer book about mouth sores and what a problem they can be. They are easily infected, can interfere with the ability to eat, are extremely painful, etc. I’ve had one small mouth sore and I think it’s not so much due to chemo, but because I bit the inside of my cheek while I was showing off blowing huge bubble gum bubbles for the kids.
• I’m dizzy a LOT. And not just the weird for-a-second dizziness, but the for-a-couple-minutes-I-might-just-fall-over dizziness. I’d do well to get myself a cane, but I don’t want to look like a pimp.
• This one I’m not complaining about too much: chemo can put women in a state of menopause. If my body starts in with huge hormonal fluctuations and hot flashes, I’ll be very upset, but for now, I’m fiiiine with menopause.
• Fatigue? Depression? I could go on for days about this stuff. I won’t though, because I’m too fatigued and depressed.
• I read about loss of appetite being common with chemo patients, often as a fear of eating due to nausea. And I’ve definitely experienced it—the oncologist said I’ve lost ten pounds since this started, in fact—but the odd thing is that it comes and goes, changing within seconds. It’s not like I don’t want to eat for a day or two; it’s more like I don’t have an appetite now I have an appetite here comes my food oh wait I don’t feel like eating this now I’ll take it home I’m starving I don’t want to eat. My tummy is a total food tease.
• Not helping the appetite problem is that my taste buds are different now. Things taste bland where they used to be delicious, or they taste metallic where they used to … not. This is something that happens with a lot of medications, and is a well-known chemo side effect. I hate it.
• I’ve been lucky not to have too much trouble with nausea. This was a huge fear of mine, after being rehydrated in the ER three times last year during particularly bad migraine episodes.
• I’m wetting the bed again. Not with pee, mind you, but with sweat. I have awakened several times on drenched sheets. What is with the night sweats? I’ve tried different types of sheets, different types of jammies, no jammies, a cold room, a warm room, no blankets, piles of blankets. Nothing seems to stop them. Am I running a fever? NO! So, um, again I ask, WTF, CANCER???

I have to just keep telling myself: IT’LL ALL BE OVER SOON. IT’LL ALL BE OVER SOON. IT’LL ALL BE OVER SOON.