Tuesday 9 March 2010

nearly all better

Well it's been better this time than last in some ways - I took only one set of anti-sickness pills and haven't had to resort to painkillers at all, having had the same twitchy pains in much smaller measure than the last time. What has been worse is the tiredness which is really becoming more noticeable now - a trip to Wimbledon for a wee bit of nothing to get really left me having to take a breather on the sofa for a good 10 mins when I got back.


The real nuisance this time has been what I think I've seen described elsewhere as "chemo-brain" - that bizarre restless churning over of endless thought processes. It's a bit like a fever in a way, in that it's not just normal trains of thought but almost mathematical or scientific programs running - the brain thinking that happens because of that, and that follows, and maybe that's why this happens and .... on and on and on, awake and asleep. The only thing that rescues it from being awful is that you're so immersed in it, like Alice in Wonderland meeting each morph of reality, that you're not objectively aware of it torturing you, you're actually having those conversations with your brain. So it doesn't really feel like something to suffer until you're beginning to come out of one of the spells and you think please, stop thinking! Give me a rest!


Of course the other person it does feel like suffering to is probably Mike, my constant loving support, and anyone like Emma who's had any kind of conversation with me over the last few days - if I sounded weird I'm sorry, I was trying to keep it real! Very very odd indeed, and like so much about this experience, it has made me think a lot about what it must be like for people who suffer these things as permanent disabilities or conditions that they live through all the time. Bloody awful, don't know how they do it. She said, completely assuming that these things will be going away once the chemo has finished when in fact there is a chance they can reverberate for a number of months or even years afterwards. Let's hope not.

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