Lymphomania: Playing Catch-Up

OK, so it's been a while. I know this. Sorry. :) When one first starts going through the whole "cancer" thing, it's pretty overwhelming. After a while, though, the novelty wears off, in more ways than one. Everything that's happening actually becomes routine; what was once unusual becomes day-to day. I guess the simplest way to put it is that things seems less news-worthy, so posts start to get more spread out. Second, usually those closest to me – family and friends – more or less know what's going on, they're going to get used to it, and as the shock wears off and they see I'm living more or less normally, I don't feel the need to inundate them with every little thing. So again, the urgency to post wanes. There's one other reason, as well. You start living in two worlds. In one, right after treatment, you're too tired to write or do much that requires much mental effort (more on that a little later). In the other, you're taking full advantage of not being in that first state. Playing games, getting caught up on work, dancing... anything that seems normal and doesn't require thoughts of the disease – not necessarily because those thoughts are depressing or bad, but just because those thoughts get so old, and any break is welcome. But when your dad calls and tells you that he went to the dentist, and the first thing they asked was when I was going to update the blog... well... how can I keep disappointing my adoring fans? ;) So I'll try to catch everyone up, even if it's in a somewhat disjoint manner, although it may take a couple of posts just to keep them at reasonable lengths. We'll see.

On May 3, I got my LAST chemo treatment of this (and hopefully only) series. I think that I was the most impatient through that one. You know how you can need to go to the bathroom badly for a while but not have the opportunity, and then right when you know you're about to be able to, the urgency suddenly increases? It's like when you know you're not going to need to hold it much longer, your body starts to let down its guard – it's all a mental thing. My last round of chemo, I knew that it was my last round; I knew I only had to take it for a few more days, and I think that I began to let my guard down mentally. Most of the six months I was OK because I had the attitude of, “This is my life right now. This is happening.” At the end, though, you start to think again about a life without it, and the contrast can begin to weigh on you. It was interesting to observer.

Another interesting thing to see was how a lack of energy affected my attitude. I found that in the latter half of treatment, I simply wasn't as cheerful in the days following infusion. It wasn't depression or melancholy or anything – just a very “meh” feeling. I discovered then that attitude does have a physiological component. Right after a treatment, I was just tired of the whole process; it had just gotten old, but by the third week – what I liked to call “normal week” – I was pretty much cheerfully ready for the docs to bring on the next treatment. I've heard about people dismissing treatment of depression and such with medication, implying that the person just needed to suck it up and snap out of it. That may be true in some cases, but I know now that yes, there can be a physiological basis for one's mood. The experience made me think about the idea that I believe most of us have that we have a consciousness that simply resides in our bodies, but we must remember that our bodies give rise to our consciousnesses. If the body gets messed up, it's going to affect the mind. The two are kinda linked.

On a totally different note: hair. My sister had told me that my hair may begin to come back before I was done with chemo, and that's what happened. When it first came out, I would not have been 100% bald without shaving; there were some hairs that hung on for dear life so that I had to periodically run a razor over my head and face. It gradually began to thicken to the point that right before my sixth treatment (if I remember correctly), I shaved it for the last time. After that I decided that it was thick enough to let go. There were a couple of instances of weirdness, though. First, the last two chemo cycles each caused beard hair to fall out, but just in the mustache and mouth area – not the cheeks or sideburns. Also, I had a little hair fall-out from the last cycle, which hadn't happened since the first cycle. So right now I do have hair on my head again, but it's finer than it was and also looks lighter – more brown instead of black. Mom said that that's what it was like when I was a baby. Who knows if it'll thicken back up? But what's really cool is that you can look at a single hair and see the effects of the chemo. The end of the strand starts out thin and slowly thickens, then suddenly gets really thin again coinciding with the next treatment, then slowly thickens up again. Kind of like tree rings, but different. You can see it in the hairs below that fell out during the last round.

Body hair also started regrowing about this time, too. Now, I hadn't mentioned anything about body hair before because it wasn't until the last half of treatment that I noticed anything. It didn't all fall out, but it did stop growing. Now, you have a natural shed rate, so what happened was that I lost body hair at what was probably a natural rate, but it wasn't being replaced, so over the course of treatment I kept getting barer and barer. I finally realized that I was getting some growth back when I noticed that I couldn't see where they had shaved my chest from the IV port implantation months earlier.

Well, I think this is actually a good place to start to wrap up. That ends chemo, and the next post will be about radiation. Last November, six months of chemo seemed like forever... half a year... My diagnosis weighed on me like few things ever have. Now, that part of it is done, and although I still think about the cancer daily, it doesn't pervade my thoughts as it did before. (It's interesting that the image that comes to mind that I am trying to describe when I say, “pervade my thoughts” isn't so different from what the disease, if left unchecked, would actually physically do to my body.)

On my last day, when I was checking out of the infusion room for the last time, as I reveled in the idea that the moment had finally come, a woman was being shown in and given the tour because she was about to start treatment. You could tell that the whole thing was still kind of unreal to her. You could see fear. Thankfully, she wasn't alone; she had another woman there with her who was taking in all the information. I talked to them a little, and she asked if the nurses were nice there, and I was able to truthfully say that they were – that they were all good people. But I can still see her in my mind. And when I picture her, I know what she was feeling then. And I know what she was about to have to endure, and it pisses me off to no end. It's funny... I don't really mind so much what I went through. Yeah, it sucked, but I'm not mad about it. I'm mad that it's happening to her. When I had my bone marrow biopsy, I saw a woman there who I had known a little over ten years ago when co-oping in another lab at GTRI, where she still worked, and I found out that she had been fighting breast cancer for the past five years. Thoughts of what she had gone through (a mutual friend told me her story) kept away any inkling of complaint on my part. She lost her fight as I was nearing completion. One of my best friends dad passed about that same time. I just heard about the six year old nephew of a guy I went to grade school with being diagnosed and going through preparation to start chemo. Those things piss me off. I can deal with this stuff happening to me; I can take what comes. But these others shouldn't have to. It makes me want to kill it. All of it. I feel more helpless toward others in that regard than toward myself, and that's really not something I expected. Maybe one day some researcher will need a piece of software that will help. Until then, I've just gotta live. To skip ahead a little, I'm almost done with radiation, but while I'm optimistic and feel perfectly healthy, I don't know that I'll be out of the woods. But right now – today – I am alive.