Week Nine of Chemotherapy
This week was just as I had expected it would be, rough. I knew when they gave me chemo a day early that I would notice and boy did I. The second day after treatment I was already feeling the steroids wearing off much earlier in the day than usual, and by the evening I was officially partially braindead. It’s hard for me to slow down and not do anything despite feeling pretty useless but I spent Friday and Saturday laying around and didn’t do much other than watch TV and relax.
By Sunday, day five, I did what I always do, forced myself to get moving and try to reactivate my brain and body. As much as I don’t like doing anything almost at all now, regardless of what day of my cycle I’m in, I still try really hard to move my body and use my brain as much as I can. This round, though, I just felt quite terrible every day even with the extra day off.
My nose bleeds have been getting worse and I’ve essentially given up on using anything to help with the dryness which leads to the bleeds because it doesn’t seem to work anymore. It’s interesting how I can be so tired on my bad days and all I want to do is sleep, but on my good days I can’t sleep well. I’m hot all night long even when it’s only sixty-five degrees in the house, and the last two nights I’ve been extremely restless and unable to sleep well.
On Tuesday, day seven of this cycle, I decided that I would go hiking to get in my one mountain of the week and get on my snowshoes. It was absolutely gorgeous weather and despite being tired and having to go really slow I had a good time. I usually hate hiking in snowshoes because they are so cumbersome and slow me down, but this time I was loving it. I was only able to do three and a half miles, though, because I was just too tired to do anymore.
With the extra day in this round I was hoping to do another hike but when I woke up Wednesday morning I was just too tired and didn’t want to go hiking, so I didn’t. I ended up working on a post for my friend’s website. Tuesday night I also was able to finally sit down and crank out my essay for my application to the doctoral program. It felt good to be able to get some work done and I’m hoping that I’ll have the energy to do some more before the chemo brain sets in.
Something that I’ve been struggling with this past round of treatment is all of the attention I’ve been getting from strangers through social media surrounding my life. I put so much out there and it’s hard to know whether people have my best interests in mind sometimes. I also struggle with trusting people I perhaps shouldn’t or thinking that just because someone is my friend on social media means they are my friend in real life, too. I would like to believe that the vast majority of people are truly caring and interested in my story because they care about me or are going through their own journey and my candidness makes them feel less alone. But I’m beginning to realize that there are those who are simply following along just to watch the story unfold for entertainment purposes and even worse, those who only followed me to grow their own numbers on social media and couldn’t care less about me or what is going on in my life.
Going through cancer treatment is hard. Going through it publicly is also hard. I have a tendency to want to only see the good and be oblivious to the fact that there are a lot of really not nice people out there. But what I have learned throughout this journey is there are a lot of people who are really nice and even though sharing my story publicly with everyone (including those who don’t care and are quite honestly not nice people) is hard, I shouldn’t let a few rotten apples ruin the whole bunch.
I’m hoping that the next round won’t be as rough as this one was. My numbers are pretty low at this point and I wonder sometimes how much lower can they go before it’s not safe. Thankfully I only have three more rounds and I am really hoping that I can manage to still do one hike per week for each of these last three. Tomorrow is Christmas and I have a lot to be thankful for this year. I’m looking forward to spending time with my two top team members (Jason and mom) and just relaxing.
