Chemo Session Three Update

I've stopped trying to figure out the rhyme and reason of chemo. So much seems so arbitrary to me.

Here I am on Day 7 of this cycle, and I've spent the past two days living my life at about 80% of my pre-chemo capacity. I've been up early, working a full day, coming home, and getting things done. Yesterday, I pretty much resumed my usual diet. I even had a glass of wine. This time around I had minor problems with diahrrea, but no problems with constipation even though I only took very minor preventative measures. My mouth is sore and that just started yesterday, so that may get worse. It's been fantastic, to be honest. If I could bottle this and sell it to other chemo patients, I'd be a zillionaire. I'm not discounting the fact that on days 1-4, I felt pretty crappy, but this kind of rebound is pretty remarkable, in my opinion.

(That being said, I have met people who said that they felt virtually no negative effects from chemo at all. I suspect that those people, like this most recent incarnation of Big Foot, are actually 96% possum.)

I do have a new symptom: minor numbness or tingling in my hands and feet. Right now it's not a big issue. When I sit or lie still for a while, I get a little coldness or pins and needles action. My RPN says that this symptom may be cumulative and (shudder) may lead to problems with my fingernails and toenails. So far, it's just annoying. Especially in the middle of "beginning of the school year" meetings.

A second symptom that I've yet to address has been acne. I've always had problems with my complexion. I used to joke (not funny) that it sucked to be divorced, childless, with grey hairs AND acne. But this is not the garden variety acne. And it's particularly upsetting because I'm, well, BALD. My face is HUGE. It goes away around halfway through the cycle, but it's a wicked indignity during the first week and change.

The day of chemo three, I had my first pre-chemo expansion (expansion #2 overall) of 60ccs per breast. Because of the horrible pain I'd been having, I hadn't been expanded for-- I'm guessing here-- around six or so weeks. At the end of the chemo 2 cycle, I started to actually feel ok, painwise, for the first time since my surgery. Again, no rhyme or reason-- but I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Despite my fears, the expansion went well, and I now have wee tiny little boobettes. I'd say that, misshapen though they are, the boobettes are as big as my mom's teeny, weeny A-cups. It doesn't do much for me, figurewise; I guess I do look a little less concave from my shoulders to my belly, and that helps.

One of the biggest complaints I had this round, though, was pain (again) during days 1-4. I have found this to be true every cycle-- that there's something in the chemo or in the 'roids that they make you take that causes the surgical site to hurt like a sonovabitch all over again. This time the pain was particularly pronounced; I imagine that was because of the expansion.

Also on the plastic surgery front, because I'm a teacher and would like to do as little harm as possible to my schedule (more on my teaching trials later), the PA at the plastic surgeon's office went ahead and scheduled my "swap out" surgery for December 17. December is a busy time for them and Dr. T is taking an extended vacation... and, I think the PA wanted to give me a light at the end of the tunnel. This is all tentative, of course, but it IS a light at the end of the tunnel.

I have yet to decide how far I want to go with the girls' expansion. For any number of reasons, I want to keep them small. But moreso than hair, when I see a woman with nice breasts, I get a little jealous. I definitely miss my girls way more than I miss my hair.

That's pretty much all the news on the physical side of things. Either later today or soon I'll update with more personal/work/emotional related stuff. I've not been as diligent with this blog as I would like to be. Ideally, I would have liked to have blogged every day even if it was just to say "Feel like shit." On the positive side, I've been keeping myself busy-- hence not making time to blog. On the negative side, I've been hiding out a bit from this process. If I don't write about it, I'm not thinking about it. Well, of course I'm thinking about it, but writing about it is PROOF that I'm thinking about it. Sigh.

Chemo 1 recap

I was too bloody miserable post chemo #1 to really keep a good eye cast on my symptoms, even though it had been my intention to log each one. But as I mentioned before, post-chemo #1 was complicated by disastrous side-effects from my painkillers. It's very, very hard to say where chemo kickback ended and painkiller evilness began.

But here's a list of stuff that I suffered through and realizations that I had during the three week cycle with chemo 1.

• Constipation/Diarrhea Cycle of Horror (with an occasional visit from Puke Evil): This was my biggest problem and the one most hard to determine whether it was primarily chemo or primarily painkillers. This began on around Day 3 where I was backed up and had been since before Chemo. Then I began to have intestinal cramps like you would have if you were going to have diarrhea, but there was no exit room for said poo. (The levees of my constipation held back the flood of the liquid crap). Despite taking the maximum dose of Senna daily and eventual Milk of Mag, I finally called the doctor in misery after hours on Saturday and was told to try the Magnesium Citrate. Unfortunately we only had the cherry flavor. After two doses of that, all hell broke lose in my body and I was pooing and puking, often simultaneously (thank goodness my tub is within barfing distance of my toilet. I'm sorry for the horrible imagery) for the better part of 14 hours. The situation finally resolved mostly somewhere in the neighborhood of the first Sunday.
  
• Regular bouts of diarrhea plagued me for most of Week 1 and kept me largely housebound because the bouts would come out of nowhere and be unmanageable. One afternoon midWeek1 I went to a coffee shop and had to come home in total panic because I just couldn't stop pooing.
  
• Hair loss: Head hair started going on Saturday, so we shaved it immediately. I may have jumped the gun a bit, as most of it is stubbly growing back. But, as untraumatized as I was about being bald, LOSING the hair made me sick to my stomach, so I would rather jump the gun than be constantly sick. Then of course, there was the Week 2 losing of my lady hair. I shaved the rest of that off pronto.
  
• Mouth sores: bothered me Week 1 and Week 3. A friend of mine whose husband is an orthodontist prescribed "Magic Mouthwash" that is a compound of pain killers and anti fungal stuff and all kinds of mouth health goodness. It helps. Big time.
  
• Weight Loss and Lack of Appetite: Week 1, especially Days 2-5, food did not sound good to me at all. It wasn't til Day 4 (I consider Chemo Day, day 1) that I finally said F*** it, and just started eating any ol' thing that appealed to me (as opposed to the veggies, protein, etc that I should have been eating). And frankly, I discovered that when the eating cards are down and you just can't stomach the good-for-you solutions, those foods that were comfort foods to you before chemo will often be comfort foods to you after chemo. I got most of my calories during Week 2 from spaghetti with Ragu and chicken ramen noodles with frozen broccoli. I just couldn't stomach yogurts and salads and healthy options. I went from 118 to 115 to 117 during the three weeks.
  
• Wacko Sleep Schedules: I've been staying up til 3 or so every night. Some of it is that I no longer associate sleep with comfort because of the difficulties associated with having my implant spacers. Some is the drugs.
  
• Acne: First couple of days, I had some nasty acne on my chin. I've always had bad skin, but this seemed quite obviously tied to the chemo and disappeared after Week 1.
  
• Exhaustion and general blahs: Emotions up and down. Lethargy which is no doubt tied to depression. Walking to the local movie theater and back kind of winds me.

That's all I can think of now. Hopefully, as I said, I will have a much better sense of things after this next cycle.

Booby Prize: Whoa!

Snap.

That's f-ed up.

I shaved my head a few weeks ago to beat the whole "falling out in clumps" thing. Fine. Good. I'm getting used to that.

But I just went to the loo and discovered that my hair "down there" is... well, falling out in clumps.

Whoa. Snap. That's f-ed up.

Seriously.

Hanging Bald

Jason says that maybe bald is the new me. After going wig shopping today, I'm pretty convinced that bald is the new me at least for the next eight months or so.

Wig shopping wasn't traumatic so much as just uncomfortable. I did buy a very sassy, very "Young Bonnie Raitt" stawberry blonde number, but I can't imagine where I will wear it. None of the wigs looked like "me." In varying degrees they all struck a very Barbie note; whose hair, in real life, is that shiny, that nuanced of shade, that healthy and swingy?

That's me with the penguin over there. I'm lucky to have been blessed (as someone just said in email) "good cheekbones," big eyes, and a pleasingly shaped head. For the most part, I've been rocking the bald look with a pretty good attitude.

What's unnerved me to a certain extent is the amount of attention that I attract.

Here's something interesting (pardon me for working through this post as I write, I'm suddenly not sure where to go with this): When I started writing this entry, I was working on the assumption that I attracted so much attention because I am bald AND I have/had cancer. I DO, I admit, definitely cut a very "Cancer Girl" figure-- I'm short, my booblessness makes me look a little scrawny, and when my make up wears down I can be pretty pale. But the question remains: if I saw a bald woman walking down the street, would I assume she had cancer?

Honestly, only one person whose attention I've attracted has directly referenced cancer. On Sunday, I went to the movie theater and a good-looking black guy told me to "Hang tough, girl." Twice. Once on the way in. Once on the way out. The first time rattled me, brought tears to my eyes. The second time it made me laugh.

Actually, that's not true. Last weekend at IKEA, an older woman in a wheelchair caught my attention by saying "Excuse me, lady" and then she yanked off her baseball hat to reveal a kindred bald pate. I didn't know what to say. It does seem apt to acknowledge my sisterhood with these women, but what's the appropriate greeting? We should have some sort of Cancer Code. Like witches (or Wiccans if you prefer) say "Blessed be" as a greeting. Maybe I should start a movement. Maybe our code should be "Hang Tough, girl." (I find the whole "Hang Tough" thing immoderately amusing because of the current revival of the New Kids on the Block. Did anyone really miss them?)

Anyway, every other person who has said "You look great" to me, or some variation thereof, may have meant just that. My local Starbucks barrista went so far as to ask me what inspired the "fashion statement." Maybe with more practice, I will come up with a more couth answer than "Uhhhh... cancer? Chemo? Uh, I had to shave it because I had uhhh... cancer." Dude took it totally in stride. "Cancer. Fashion. Fashion. Cancer. Whatever. You look great."

So maybe it's only in my head that I am attracting attention because I am Cancer Girl and that makes me uncomfortable. I'm weirded out in my noggin by the sense that there's pity being whiffed in my general direction. But maybe I should start thinking of it as "I'm attracting attention because I look great, and that's fantastic."

Honestly, once upon a time, on the day here and there when I attracted attention because I was cute and I had a HUGE RACK, I rather appreciated the compliment inherent in the attention. (I know I part ways with most feminists on this, but I guess it never happened enough or in a crude enough way to ever really strike me as "objectification.")

And some of my favorite people have been bald. Sinead O'Connor is a fracking nutcase, but she's always been gorgeous. Until today, I'd somehow forgot that the greatest female action hero in history-- Ripley from Aliens-- was bald in #3. Natalie Portman was bald in V for Vendetta (which I've yet to say). She's not only beautiful, but smart too. She even said at the time that she wished she could keep her bald head. There's a great gallery of "Eight Women Who Look Better Bald Than Britney [Spears]" here.

Truth is, though, I would put Big Money on a bet that the moment I step off the plane in New England to visit my mother, if I am not sporting a wig, she'll offer to take me to a wig store. When I called my mom and told her I shaved my head, she said, "Why on earth would you do that?" Again, not very good with the snappy comebacks: "Uh... started to fall out. Couldn't handle it. Freaked out." Her response: "I bet you look like a dyke."

And that's where so many people are when it comes to hair. If you're bald, you're either Cancer Girl or a lesbian (and not the glamorous kind--the gender bending, threatening kind) or wanting to draw some sort of attention to yourself for a personal or politcal reason. And although my mother would keel over if I were a lesbian (she's not a bigot-- I don't mean to make her sound bad; she's just of a certain age), I think the latter would be the worst for my mother. We're New Englanders. You just don't make a S-P-E-C-T-A-C-L-E out of yourself if you can do anything to help it.

And I can do something to help not make a spectacle out of myself. I could wear a wig. But I don't think I will. Because I look great.