A Hard Cycle and Why Are My Counts STILL Not Normal
Well, I’m back in the large gray recliner at Dana Farber again. This will be my eighth round of Herceptin and for some reason my last three week cycle was rougher than normal. I just couldn’t seem to find my way out of the mind fog and the tiredness. Now, I get another dose of chemo, just as I’m slowly pulling out of it and beginning to feel normal. It’s so frustrating and I have to do this seven more times. I get frustrated at my body for being weak, for not being able to hammer out 12-15 mile hikes with 4000’ vert day after day. I get frustrated at my mind for being foggy and struggling to find words or forgetting things that I was just about to say. I get frustrated that I have such a hard time waking up in the mornings and that I am not as skinny as I was pre treatment.
To be honest, I get frustrated a lot lately. I don’t know why I can’t just feel normal or push harder through the sluggishness and do more. I’m really hard on myself and I don’t believe that I deserve a break because it could be so much worse. My blood counts are still not normal even though it has been almost six months since my last round of Taxol. I want to be at 100% and I’m worried that I never will be. What if my counts never recover? What if my brain never does? What if I did serious and permanent damage to my body by undergoing treatment and I’ll have to live with the side effects for the rest of my life?
There was a girl that I knew growing up that got diagnosed with lung cancer in middle school and I remember she never was the same after that. She always looked a bit sick and sort of like a cancer patient for the rest of her life. Her hair never grew back to full thickness and she just looked like she never got back to her precancer self. I wonder if that is how I look now and I just don’t know it because I see myself in the mirror every day.
It hasn’t been the greatest cycle. I feel like I didn’t do my best and didn’t try hard enough to do everything I wanted to do over the past three weeks. However, the good news is that I always see each treatment as a reset, a start over, and now I get to try again and do better! So, as much as I hate getting treatment, it allows me to reset and start over again. Today I get to start over again and try even harder to hike more, do more, write more and live more in the moment for the next three weeks.
On another note, I think hair might go through some strange cycles when you’re undergoing treatment and I’m a bit concerned that my eyelashes and brows are thinning again. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I swear they look thinner and my bottom lashes seem to be shedding more. I have been trying to be patient with myself about losing weight gained during the winter, and have been really frustrated that the pounds don’t seem to be dropping off (although I can’t say I do that much to lose weight). However, I looked at some older photos of myself from the end of Taxol in January and I have definitely lost weight. This made me feel so happy and relieved that I’m losing weight even if it’s slow.
The last thing that I wanted to mention about these past three weeks that is good news is I have been on only a half dose of my anti-anxiety medication now for two weeks and a half dose of my new anti-anxiety medication and had no side effects from decreasing my dose! I was absolutely terrified that I’d have a terrible experience with getting off of Paxil but so far it has been a piece of cake! Next week I will stop taking it altogether and switch exclusively to Celexa so hopefully that goes smoothly. Then I will be able to start taking Tamoxifen whenever they decide to start me on it.
Follow up - I talked to my oncologist about my concerns regarding this last cycle and how I felt yucky. She ran bloodwork and my counts have dropped since the previous cycle. I’m not sure what this means (if anything). But, it definitely explains why I felt weaker and sicker for the past three weeks. I asked if I should be eating more protein or taking in iron because I don’t - if this would help my counts. I hate seeing my numbers go down. It concerns me and I’m pretty sure it would concern anyone when they’re undergoing cancer treatment. I wish doctors were more empathetic. I hate that most of what I ask never gets answered, that it’s all so vague, and that I don’t trust that my doctors know what they’re doing. It feels pointless to even bring up concerns when they arise because I never get an answer as to why I feel like I do or what could be the cause of a symptom. Honestly I’ve completely given up trying to communicate with my oncologist about how I’m feeling or what my symptoms are because it seems to fall on deaf ears. I think the mantra of cancer is: if you’ve never had it you just can’t possibly understand what it’s like.
