Chemotherapy

People ask if I had radiation.  No, chemotherapy or just plain old chemo.  CHEMotherapy, CHEMicals.  No radiation treatments for what I had.

The chemo is given through the PICC line since the chemicals can damage blood vessels, so going in close to the heart dilutes it with blood.  Basically I was connected to a pump but are free to move around.  I often did walks around the hallways, or sat in the reclining chair in my room to read, or laid on the couch in the room (Cooper had a couch and two TVs per room) to watch TV.  The chemo usually took about an hour.  No pain, no discomfort, it all seems overrated.

Now, the week after your chemo is when I started feeling it.  Generally it was just tiredness, so I napped a few hours each day.  One day I woke up for breakfast, turned on TV, fell asleep, woke up for lunch, fell asleep, work up for dinner, then took another nap before waking up to read a bit before falling asleep for the night.

I asked my loved ones to text rather than call, or turned off my phone.  Sleep is really important so I didn’t want to be disturbed.

Chemo did cause other problems as time went on, such as diarrhea and then constipation.  Sorry to bring up such subjects, but if you’re facing chemo you might as well know about this.

Hair loss took about three weeks after the chemo started.  It was coming out quickly but I asked the nighttime nurse to just cut it off.  I quickly leaned to put my vanity on the shelf when dealing with all the side effects of the chemo.  Losing hair was minor.

For those wondering, yes, that is a Corner Gas T-shirt.  I watched a lot of that while recovering.

I’ve heard of people using devices to cool their scalp to prevent hair loss.  Never tried it, so I can’t comment on it.

Different chemo mixes have different levels of causing baldness so your doctor can tell you about whatever you’re going to get.  But ultimately, would you rather live without your hair or die with it?  I chose to live.

Initially after the first two chemos my hair started to return as “chemo curl” which is pretty common.  Tight curls, hair a bit darker, etc:

I wish I had that much hair now.  After about six months after the chemo my wife finally cut my hair… NJ shut down hair care shops because of COVID right about this time.  After the haircut my hair started growing back much straighter, looking pretty good again.

Chemo Fog/Chemo Brain

Some chemo drugs really screwed my mind.  I was transferred to ICU at least twice right after chemo and barely remember one of the times.  I kind of realized my rooms were different but could not understand why.

I had a lot of hallucinations for a few days and completely lost track of time.  One day it seemed awfully dark out for 9 AM so I kept asking the nurses if there was a heavy storm.  CNN was playing a show about the Apollo moon landings at the wrong time… it’s only 9 AM but they were showing something that wasn’t supposed to be on until 9 PM.  Well, I didn’t understand the difference in time.  I called my wife one day to ask why she didn’t visit but she said she had just gotten home from the hospital.  We went over the conversation but I was sure that was from yesterday.

I found that simple things were extremely difficult to do, even figuring out how to get out of bed to use the bathroom.  Organizing my roll-up try so I could eat a meal was confusing.  Time was completely baffling.

Once the worst of the fog wore off, I was trying to get back to fun stuff like writing software and quickly realized I couldn’t understand a lot of the code I had written in the past.  Since I’m a software engineer by trade, this was extremely concerning, as it meant I’d never be able to work again.  Writing simple “hello world” applications (any programmer knows what I am talking about) was difficult and needed a lot of Googling to figure out.  Fortunately most of my neat stuff was in Github so everything was backed up, and there was no way I could get any git command to work so the code was safe.

During chemo the nurses would do daily mental tests like standing on one leg, where am I, what day of the week it is, who is the President, etc.  The sad part is I could pass those tests but still be confused by the clock.  Of course, being an engineer, I leaned to cheat and each day the nurses would write their names and current date on a whiteboard in my room, and it already had my room number.  Ie, I could get the answers to questions from the whiteboard.  Once I did have fun and told the nurse Ronald Reagan was just re-elected and we were going to have men land on the moon any day now.  She had a stunned look on her face, so I laughed and gave her right answers.