Debunking Chemo

One of my biggest worries going into all of this was what chemotherapy would actually entail. I’d often heard people sometimes consider the cure to be worse than the disease, so I wasn’t exactly looking forward to getting an inside scoop on this. But, now that I have, here’s my personal take: believe what you hear. Chemo sucks.

True to its name, it’s pretty much just a mix of different chemicals (all the doctors call it a “cocktail” of chemicals which I quite frankly find to be a gross description). The type and quantity of these chemicals vary depending on your diagnosis and size, so everyone gets different treatments. Being perfectly honest, I don’t actually know the names of the chemicals I get. They’re long and medical-sounding and I put them right out of my head months ago. What I do know is that my doctors are giving me a combination of medications that will cure the lymphoma and both prevent it from coming back later and reduce my risk of long term side effects. I really don’t bother too much with learning the specificities of what goes into my chemotherapy, because it’s what happens during and after that matters more to me.

I get my chemo intravenously, which is just adding insult to injury, as I’ve got a pretty big phobia of needles. I have it for several hours over the course of two days at an infusion clinic every other week. I’m usually asleep when I’m actually getting the chemo because they give me tons of anti-nausea medicine that makes me insanely drowsy. The real trouble starts after my Day One treatment, where I start to feel dizzy and queasy and overall just awful. The gross feeling continues through Day Two and then begins to fade by the following night. I have no appetite during the chemo days because it changes my taste buds and basically makes everything taste like garbage.

The strange part of chemo is that when I’m in the recovery week between treatments I feel perfectly fine. If you saw me, you might not even know I was sick.  When I’m recovered from the chemo, I kind of forget how bad it felt and block it out of my mind and I try to get back to doing normal things like seeing my friends and doing schoolwork. But then when the two weeks pass and it’s time to go back again for my next treatment, the worry and anxiety comes back because I remember how bad I’m going to feel.

While I do purposefully shut out memories of the chemo, I’ve also been having some unintentional memory issues. I’ve got a bad case of “chemo brain,” which yes, is a real thing. Basically I have a terrible attention span and some acute short term memory loss. I don’t remember conversations or tv shows that I literally just saw, things like that. It’s not a huge issue, I guess, but it’s really weird.

There’s no way to get around the fact that chemo is absolutely terrible. It hasn’t gotten any easier now that I’ve had it a bunch of times, but I know what to expect now. I only have a couple more rounds left, and what helps me through it is knowing that every day of chemo is one step closer to the last day of chemo.