Cancer could be so much worse

I've written about lily pads before, and frankly I think it was some of my better writing. I'd humbly suggest you go back and re-read it at this point, but if you are busy and just need a refresher the gist of that very early post is that coping with the diagnosis and treatment and recovery associated with cancer is too big to be done at once. I need to take it one step at a time, like a frog crossing a pond using a series of lily pads (which they totally don't do but let's not get hung up on the literal here). With me so far? Good. So the lily pad that I have been on recently was kind of scary. In my last blog post I wrote about being neutropenic  and how my chemotherapy was delayed because of the risk of wiping out my bone marrow so badly that it wouldn't recover. I also wrote about the irony involved in my realization that the only thing worse than getting poisoned every two weeks with the resultant negative effects including neutropenia was not  getting po

Getting chemo sucks. I mean, really  sucks. First off, just sitting in a chair for three hours while a very nice, very helpful nurse pumps what is essentially poison into my veins is at the very least tedious. There is not a lot to do, and for part of the time the nurse has to take down my old PICC dressing and replace it with a new one. But aside from that fifteen minute task, a lot of the time is spent sitting in the chair waiting for the poison to fill my veins. When it is all done, I get to go home with my baby bottle of more poison to run over the next two days, inconveniently attached to my PICC by an approximately one metre long tube. Okay, the medical term for it is an Intermate or Infusor , but the term baby bottle  describes it so much better. The baby bottle makes it impossible to shower. I wear a fanny pack (something I probably should have thrown out when the 80s ended and they were no longer fashionable) to contain the bottle, but as you might imagine it's also not

I hope this brief post makes at least a little sense. If it doesn't, well... look at the title and it might make sense why it doesn't  make sense. Chemo brain . If the Mayo Clinic calls it a thing, it's a thing. And although this post is short I wanted to share with you what it is like because it's kind of a hell of a thing. I wasn't really sure whether I would get chemo brain, but on the Sunday after my first cycle of chemo (four days after my oxaliplatin and two days after my fluorouracil finished) I woke up at 10:30 AM, way  later than I've been waking up. I walked out to the living room feeling like I was running the last mile of a marathon and sat in my chair for about ten minutes trying to figure out what I should do next. My stomach grumbled and so I figured I should eat something, but by the time I got to the kitchen (25 feet away), I had forgotten why I was there. I looked around the room for clues. Dishes... okay. Food... right. Stove, fridge, mi