PROGRESS: Day 1.3

Physical feelings

Okay, today was worse. I slept horribly last night. I was tired when I went to sleep, but when my head hit the pillow it was like I just couldn’t fall asleep. I lay awake for what felt like hours. I definitely dreamed, but somehow I still felt awake. And if I woke up in the middle of the night, it was hard to go back to sleep. That’s really annoying for me since I normally sleep like a log. Also, I could feel my heart beating in my chest and I could tell my resting heart rate was higher than normal. Thankfully, my Garmin watch confirmed that for me!

I still don’t feel nauseous (thank goodness), but I can tell I don’t feel 100% either. I’m getting a bit of heartburn, but that has only been mildly a problem. I know a lot of people say two – three days after the chemotherapy can be their worst day(s). Again, I know it will get worse as I go along, but I’m really hoping I develop some predictable “schedule” where I can anticipate when I will feel the worst and when it will start to improve a bit. This reminds me a bit of the horrible all-day sickness I felt for most of my 1st trimester and some of my 2nd trimester when I was pregnant. Somedays it would just be so horrible, I couldn’t imagine a time that it would actually feel better or believe that it would get better.

Oh my gosh, my hair! I’m only supposed to wash it twice a week. As someone who washes their hair every day, my hair feels so incredibly gross to me and it’s only been 3 days! “They say” (I feel like I’ll be writing that a lot) that chemo eventually starts to dry you out, so my hair shouldn’t be as greasy as it feels to me now. Hopefully, with the scalp cooling I won’t lose too much hair, so I’ll probably come to appreciate my remaining greasy hair.

Emotional feelings

I had a pity party for myself this morning. And in the afternoon. And in the evening! I felt tired, but not sleepy. I was emotionally bummed, because I knew it meant that today was going to be a day that I probably needed to chill out and not ride my bike. I despaired thinking that I could feel like this until my next treatment and then all the way through my remaining days of treatment while getting worse. It worried me that maybe I’d never get to ride my bike (definitely catastrophizing). My symptoms worry me because it’s not like you don’t understand you are going to feel like shit on chemo. But the same feelings/symptoms can be “normal” or “bad” depending on certain things and it’s not exactly like most people have gone through chemo before to have any intuition to tell the difference. Your only option is to call the doctor’s office and tell them how you feel. My oncologist and nurse practitioner are super nice though. I talked to the nurse and she told me she was happy I called and they wanted to hear how I was doing so I shouldn’t feel silly about calling at all. I still did though. Ha!

It probably was somewhat of a psychological blow to feel so good the day immediately following treatment. I think the lack of sleep was the biggest blow to my mood. I’m hoping for that upswing between treatments so that it can give me renewed confidence that I’m not always going to feel awful, that I will be able to ride my bike again throughout my treatment and that not every night of sleep will be this terrible. I can tell you, I’m very excited for my next round of Benadryl though! The Benadryl had an extremely relaxing effect.

By the end of the day, I decided to take a shower and wash my hair which helped to pick up my mood a bit. It felt good to not feel so sickly all over. I need to keep reminding myself to just take it one day at a time and to give myself a break for being emotional. Tomorrow will be one day closer!

Totally random note

All this stuff aside, we had a moment of excitement this evening. Sean and I noticed Ginny (our dog) rolling around out in the yard. She reserves this activity for only the grossest, stinkiest types of things so we knew whatever it was going to be, it wasn’t going to be pleasant. The last time, she rolled in a bunch of animal poop. This time is was a dead animal! Yuck! Probably a mole or some other small critter (it was hard to tell). Of course, she got a nice bath and Sean thoroughly disinfected her. Now she’s a sweet-smelling, fluffy bunny dog.