Chemo Brain
This morning actually started off fabulously. I woke early, probably around 5:30, but with no real desire to get up right away. So I laid there in bed, read some email after a while and then decided to rise about ten or fifteen minutes after my wife got up to shower. When I went to stretch my legs and let the cat in to the rest of the house, my knees were a touch wobbly, but I felt great, alert and happily not at all nauseous.
Poured myself some cold coffee from yesterday and gathered the necessary intel to begin preparing some breakfast for the rest of the family. Boiled some water for oatmeal, got a muffin down from the top of the fridge and ate a banana while I prepped a fresh pot of coffee. Then I made myself a sort of “protein shake mocha” which I choked down. That was kind of gross. But it is probably good enough for me to try developing a taste for.
My energy levels were good, so I drove my daughter to school and then spent an hour or so by the coffee cart caffeinating myself and chatting with various parents and staff members about my experience and why we need to “change the narrative” when discussing cancer. It was a good talk and great for focusing some of my current ideas on the subject. (Later this evening, I revisited this with some neighbors and got some very encouraging feedback.)
Leaving the school, I ran some errands and talked on the phone and continued to feel pretty darn good all around. In fact, I noticed that I felt better than I did yesterday morning prior to the chemotherapy treatment. This didn’t totally surprise me, as there had to be some butterflies in my stomach going into the infusion center for the first time and not knowing exactly what to expect. But still, that had been the extent of it: excitement and a tinge of anxiety about the unknown, but not enough to qualify as anything out of the ordinary or any different from going in for a job interview.
When I settled in at my computer after lunch, I had a couple of hours ahead of me catching up on correspondence and news and job updates. By the time I had gotten through most of it, just around 2:45, I noticed that my head was teetering on the edge of fogginess. My first thought was what I had heard about “chemo brain,” which is a general wooziness, I imagine, and tiredness around the thought process, highlighted by attention or memory issues. It was right about this time that my wife pulled up with my daughter on our “short” day of school.
In truth, I felt a little buzzed and a little like I had some weird bug in my system. But only until I had been walking around a bit. Then it dawned on me that it could just as easily been a sensation brought on by sitting in front of my laptop screen for a couple of hours without motivating my body. Having the family home with me kept me on my feet a little more and by 4:30 I felt a lot more like my regular self. And after dinner, I split my time between listening to my daughter’s violin practice, picking up a few items and getting back to the computer for a while. It’s 7:45 pm now and I’m feeling great. My mind is ticking at a good clip, I’m comfortable and not in the least addle-headed.
The body is an interesting machine. It isn’t always quite as predictable as we’d like, but if you listen to it and really pay attention it can give pretty good clues about what is going on and what it needs. I’m better at picking up some clues than others, as we all are I imagine. But I plan to use this time to get more in tune with what it is telling me, if not about who I am, at least about what I am.