Coming out of the Woods

Today, I’ve come pretty far out of the woods. It’s been a week since my chemo and a harder week than I expected after the first day. I was misled by how well I felt at first only to be drawn down by generalized feelings of “sickness.” The hiccups that I had for a couple of days were not too bad, but the intestinal upset, general malaise, and feelings of sickness that followed were more debilitating. My guess is that it took several days for my body to respond in general to the “poisoning” that is systemic chemotherapy; however, the chili dogs I ate may have contributed to that problem as much as the chemo drugs.

I got the sense that my body was whipsawed between chemo drugs stomping on the vomit accelerator and anti-nausea drugs stomping on the brakes. The anti-nausea drugs seem to act on the nervous system, and I wonder if they had anything to do with some strange symptoms I had, especially Tuesday and Wednesday, such as my heart rate dropping into the 40’s. I’m relatively certain that the compazine caused my blurred vision because I stopped taking it last night at 9 pm and can see clearly today. Compazine is a psychoactive drug, and I wonder if I continued taking it after I could have stopped without suffering from nausea? If the nausea accelerator is no longer being stomped, does continuing to stomp on the anti-nausea brakes create other problems? Compazine may have sapped my mental energy as well as my visual acuity, because nothing held my attention. I was simultaneously bored but uninterested in and unable to focus on anything. On the other hand, I had a couple of near-nausea experiences yesterday so maybe I was right not to stop the compazine. But then, how much were the chemo drugs and/or chili dogs responsible for the pervasive sense of sickness? Please excuse my rambling. I’m just trying to make sense of incomplete information.

My appetite has rebounded today. Jana ran over to Taco Bell to get a burrito late in the morning to satisfy my craving, and I just had a salad with canned chicken breast (one of the few foods that has had any appeal in the last couple of days). Oh, I also learned of a delicious treat, Minute Maid soft frozen limeade. It’s like a really nice lime sorbet.

They say that women can only have more than one child because of the built in amnesia that occurs after childbirth; otherwise, they would not go through it again. I hope that a similar amnesia affects chemotherapy patients, but I know from my father’s experience thirty plus years ago that that did not occur then. Maybe the improved nausea control helps.

Time for a frozen limeade.

David