Everyday an Adventure

Chemotherapy is in the top five weirdest enduring experiences I’ve ever lived through right up there with deployments, foreign travel and the entirety of 2016.

Everyone is familiar with the usual tropes of chemo: hair loss and nausea, but there are less discussed and less experienced versions of this facet of chemotherapy that I’ve experienced as direct effects or secondary/tertiary effects.

In my last post I put the blurb about Cisplatin, the chemo agent, from Wikipedia and it isn’t wrong. While hair loss hasn’t hit me… yet… the nausea I experienced last week was very strong and enduring. Fortunately, the medicines we have to combat nausea in the modern age are very good at what they do assuming you don’t miss one of your doses. With the help of my mother keeping me on a pill regimen, an electro-shock wristband from my uncle’s family, and intelligently managing my activity levels I remain relatively unaffected aside from the general feeling of nausea- no barfing from either end during the first full week following my infusion.

What did happen, however, was the amplification of my service-connected tinnitus and some high-end hearing loss. This was widely broadcasted by my doctors as a very likely side effect, but unfortunately there is no way to mitigate it. It’s very likely by the time I’m done with my third (and hopefully final) course of chemo at the end of April that I will need hearing aids. The upshot of this is that I’m told they have bluetooth now, so I won’t have to burden myself with using (read: remember to bring) earbuds anymore at the gym ever again.

In an effort to get in front of the unbearably short term effects of Cisplatin like nausea, and anticipating allergic reactions, you are given anti-nausea meds, steroids, and stool-softeners. The anti-nausea comes in a short course of one daily pill that takes you through the worst of it, but is supplemented by shorter-acting longer-term meds that are taken during intervals or as-needed. One side effect of these medicines that no one told me to expect was hiccups. Good lord the fucking hiccups. Hiccups are frustrating for a normal, healthy person, and absolutely maddening for someone undergoing cancer treatment. Dr. Farrell, my MedOnc, checked up on me the next day telephonically to see how I was doing and when I mentioned the hiccups I got an, “Oh, yeah, a lot of people experience that from the nausea meds.”

I am a lot of people.

============

Week 2

By Sunday I was starting to feel better. Not 100%, but much better than “nauseated semi-vegetable.” The skin on the right side of my neck was starting to regularly peel, but nothing worse than someone in the last throes of sunburn recovery might experience. Otherwise, all systems were nominal.

Monday was when I began to experience something like a normal feeling. I woke up to a call that my proton radiation therapy was cancelled because the machine was undergoing maintenance. On the one hand, this was a relief because I didn’t have to endure a drive to and from north Seattle, but a bit of a letdown because it was one more day added onto the back end of my treatment.

Tuesday, now Tuesday I began to feel like a real person again. I woke up to an unseasonably nice day and decided that in lieu of a daily walk around the block I’d attempt at mowing my grass. If you’ve lived in the northwest, you’ll observe that once the fall rains come, many people just give up on maintaining their lawns until summer because of how hard waterlogged grass is to maintain. The end result is come spring, most yards have grass that comes up to your calves. Now my little electric 40v mower is a stud, but tall damp grass takes considerable effort and battery charge to tame. I mowed about a 12’x12’ square before I broke a bead of sweat, and decided I didn’t want to push my body’s luck. I went inside and started pounding water and racked out in my easy chair. The fatigue and electrolyte loss that chemo induces is absolutely real.

It was around this time my skin started to go haywire. My skin began to get tremendously oily and I started to have small breakouts on my face, scalp, and back. They weren’t painful, just unsightly and another blow to my already crippled self-confidence. Apparently this is a delayed side effect of the steroids I was on the previous week to get in front of potential allergic reactions, but they haven’t subsided much so I am beginning to think this is another fun chemo experience.

The ex asked me if I wanted to take on the kids mid-week to make up for the previous lost weekend, as they were on spring break, and I jumped at the opportunity (that and it saves us on childcare costs as she wasn’t taking off work). My mother had her reservations, but ultimately supported me in this endeavor. I arranged a ride from one of my work mentors to radiation on Wednesday and she took my car to go pick them up.

============

Quality Time

Having the kids around again took a tremendous amount of stress off of my shoulders. I pride myself on being as active in their lives as I am allowed to be, and being a rock of normalcy for them to lean on during the uncertainty of the last couple years. That said, they are still kids and they are exhausted even when I’m a healthy man. With my mom on hand, I went from doing zone parenting to man parenting, however, and was able to spend quality time one-on-one with them as best I could.

By Thursday, I felt recovered enough to drive myself to treatment, so I took my seven year old daughter with me and for her it was just another adventure with dad. The cancer center front desk gave her a Nintendo Switch to play with and she was happy as a clam playing that while I received my treatment. The next day she wanted to work on one of their puzzles and play Uno. I’d imagine for her these excursions were just more daddy-daughter time where she got to do fun activities in new places, and if that’s what she pulls out of this experience then I can live with that.

The downside of this time was I finally lost all remaining taste buds and my dry mouth has started to ramp up. It hit me sharply on Wednesday, following the loss of my taste buds, and has not remained consistent, which I’ve taken as a good thing. Through nutrition, hydration, and medical maintenance, I am doing remarkably well in tolerating the radiation so far.

I returned to full on COVID-rules mode on Saturday, my first excursion into a place that is high-threat to immune systems even in good times: the hockey rink. My daughter has her games on most Saturdays and the undersized, under-sanitized, and overcrowded locker rooms full of kids are not friendly for someone with a degraded immune response. For her though, I was going to roll the dice. Hockey is the only part of her old life that’s remained consistent and I will protect it at a high cost. I masked up, put the hand sanitizer in my pocket, and got there early enough to get into the far corner of the locker room before it filled up with people.

After we returned the weather was fantastic so I set out to do more of the lawn. The 12×12 was already starting to look shaggy so I went back over it, and managed to mow the rest on as much as a full charge would allow me. Normally a full charge will last me the entire front and back yard, but with so tall and still slightly damp grass it netted me about 80% of the backyard before I transitioned to the weed wacker to finish the back. The front will have to wait until I can work up the energy on another cooperative weather day.

I made somewhat of an error in judgement on Sunday, however. In an effort to give my mom a break from driving, I convinced her I was well enough to execute the return trip with the kids on my own. The first hour went fine, but after my eyes started to bother me and my nose began to drain in what I can only assume is spring allergies, unless this is another delayed chemo response. Despite sucking down a ton of water, which is basically an everyday occurrence for me as part of the chemo management, I was miserable and tired.

Miserable and tired should have been the title for last week’s entry.

============

The views and opinions presented herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Army.