Week Twelve of Chemotherapy

It’s the end but it’s really only the halfway point, which is really only the beginning of a lifelong journey. Everybody wants a nicely wrapped package, with clear cut beginning and end dates, but that’s not how it works with cancer. In the past twelve weeks I have gone through something I never imagined I could handle and I did it, I believe, with grit and grace. It feels like a whirlwind now, but on the bad days it seems like an eternity before I emerge from the weeds. I finished my final(?) round of Taxol on Thursday, January 7, 2021. As much as I want to say it’s done, I don’t know that, none of us do. Monique thought she was done with cancer treatment, had her port removed, and was back getting chemotherapy again within weeks. I know it’s a different type of cancer, but it still hits so close to home that I can’t separate my own experience from hers; not yet, at least. 

Sitting here on day seven of my twelfth round, my twelfth straight week of chemotherapy, I feel very foggy and it’s a gentle reminder that I’m far from all better. It’s interesting how people think that chemotherapy only makes you feel bad on the days you get it, or that somehow the symptoms and side effects miraculously stop as soon as you get that final round. Heck, if you had asked me how chemotherapy worked a year ago, I would’ve thought the same thing. But the day of treatment is just the beginning of the cycle, and although I am excited to be done with Taxol, I know that it will take months to get my blood counts back to normal and that I am still in the middle of treatment. The final round felt surreal and I was very excited to walk out of the treatment center knowing that my next time entering I would only be getting Herceptin. It felt like I could finally start getting back to a normal life, like the end of the beginning was in sight. 

I look back on the past twelve weeks and there are definitely a lot of things that I believe got me through treatment, but one thing seems to be at the forefront. Not giving in to the fog, fighting the desire to just lay there and exist until the twelve weeks were up, and having goals and using them as motivating factors to keep going, were integral parts of managing my side effects. If it wasn’t for my husband encouraging me to exercise, get up and move, and my mom going on walks with me throughout the twelve weeks, I don’t think I would’ve recovered from each cycle as well as I did. Having hiking as a motivating factor, the goals I set for myself to exercise five days a week, and hike one mountain per week, and all of the support I got through friends, definitely made a huge difference in my weekly recovery, as well. The other factor that I believe got me through treatment was drinking enough water. I would drink at least three liters of water per day and I am convinced that if I didn’t do that, I would have had less energy and felt worse throughout treatment.

When I compare week one to week twelve, I see such a difference in how much I understand what chemotherapy would be and is like. In the beginning I thought that on day three (the worst days of chemotherapy are usually days three and four) I would wake up feeling horrible and barely able to function. In reality, days three and four were the days that I would feel the most tired and have the worst chemo brain, but it was more of a gradual decline over the course of the twelve weeks. Eventually, the fog and exhaustion that I would experience days three and four began to seep into the rest of the days of the week, until it came down to hours not days where I would feel almost normal, although never quite back to my old self. 

When starting treatment the mental fog and sensory overload were the worst side effects, and now at the end of treatment the anemia and physical exhaustion is starting to wear on me. I get winded just picking up around the house and it’s frustrating to feel so weak, but I am excited that my blood counts will begin to go back up again now and I will get strong again soon. The majority of the weeks followed the same outline, feeling ok day two, tired three and four, a little better five, and then more myself by day six and seven, however there were a few weeks that didn’t follow this timeline. Over the twelve weeks, I learned how to read my body really well, manage my side effects, and when to push through and when to rest. In the end, I learned how to better understand what my side effects and symptoms were telling me I needed to do, whether it was to eat, rest, get up and walk, or drink more, and I believe I can use this new found understanding of my body to help me become a better hiker. 

My main side effects over the twelve weeks were: 

• Chemo brain 

• Physical tiredness/weakness due to low blood counts

• Heartburn 

• Nose bleeds

• Loss of taste/smell 

• Hot flashes (only at night)

• Loss of hair

The most frustrating side effects that I experienced were the hot flashes, heartburn, and nose bleeds. I know that I will continue to have these side effects for a while, and I’m not sure which ones are caused by Herceptin or the Taxol, but tomorrow, when I get just Herceptin, I will find out. 

Now, as I finish up the last day of my twelfth week of chemotherapy it feels quite the same as any other week, because tomorrow I go in for treatment, only now I am only getting Herceptin. I am curious to see what it’s like to only get Herceptin, and am hopeful that my side effects will be much less severe. I am also curious to see what my blood counts will be from my very last round of chemotherapy so I can compare them to my first round. Overall, chemotherapy certainly wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I remember at the very beginning, week two, my mom said to me, “you’re one-fifth of the way done” and I just about choked her because it seemed like I would never finish treatment. I forgot about that conversation until the other day when she reminded me of it. Cancer treatment has taught me many things, but probably the most important thing it has taught me is to take things one day at a time. That’s really the only way to navigate this lifelong diagnosis.