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Okay, after a very brief comment last week (I think?) to let everyone know that I had finally managed a chemo treatment, I promptly shut down for days. As the treatment had been done at the end of the day, my wakes and sleeps were totally screwed around. However, the extra nausea drug they gave at the hospital managed to knock me out pretty well until next morning, when my body took over. I spent Friday drifting from TV shows to bed and back all day – didn’t feel toooo awful as long as nothing got in the way.
Friday night, though, was a horror story…I couldn’t sleep at all, felt sick the whole night (more so if I was laying down) and everytime I looked at the clock thinking that 30 minutes must have passed, I was lucky to have 5 minutes gone by. This, pretty much continued through the weekend. On Sunday, I rang the hospital to see if I could up the nausea meds and was told I could double them. This helped me limp through to Monday. Honestly, the best I could describe it as is feeling like a vacuous jellyfish – unable to string two thoughts together and unable to support my body on my spine, all of the time feeling sick. Couldn’t watch telly, read, talk to anyone and unable to sleep.
I rang the oncology people again on Monday to tell them I was really struggling with this. By 1pm, a new script had been faxed to a local chemist, including a drug that would deal with the nausea better and included a relaxant. Hooray! Hell – I don’t care if they think I’m a looney tune needing to calm down. Not only to I get to feel more human – I can do it while sleeping! Someone give the doctor a prize! (And I mean that – no sarcasm intended.) Personally, I don’t know why there is no chemo suite somewhere… medically monitored but with all us chemo babies kept drugged to the gills while the poison does it’s dirtiest, then when we’re fit for the land of the living, woken up and sent on our ways. Makes perfect sense to me. Anyway, given that I’ve now caught up on days of sleep, the drug is not as effective in that sense but the good thing is that I feel I’ve turned a corner today (Day 8), and while not back to normal, at least heading there. Today is the first day I’ve been able to actually read an email rather than just knowing it’s something I could handle quite well in my former life. I’ve even been able to watch “Shetland” and understand it (well mostly, I have to say I still get stuck on the odd accent.)
I know I’ve got to be careful as I’m now inching into the realm of immunosuppression where one little snotty-goblet with poor hygiene could land me in intensive care for days. So if you have something sniffly – sniffle it the other way from me, please!
My next step is to try to resume some exercise. I was walking 5 km per day at least prior to chemo but I think I’ve lost a lot of that condition over the past week so I think it’ll be slow progress.
One of these nasties mostly down (2 1/2 more weeks) – 3 more treatments to go! I’ll worry about the 12 others, later. This is me being positive…today…don’t ask tomorrow…