PROGRESS: Day 3.6

We are into August and quickly approaching Treatment #4! My physical symptoms have been very manageable. The biggest complaints I have right now is that I notice I get canker sores in my mouth following treatment and I think that I might be starting to feel the fatigue.

I thought I was experiencing lingering symptoms of an old cold or that I had picked up a new cold from Maddie, because I thought I had a sore throat. I realized on Saturday that I didn’t actually have a sore throat, but I had a canker sore on my uvula (that dangling piece of tissue in the back of your mouth). Gross, I know. The week before I had gotten a little canker sore on the side of my tongue, which hurt but wasn’t awful. This was really only painful because of the position. Every time I swallowed it felt like I was trying to swallow a baseball. I bought some Biotene to see if that would help alleviate the pain. Either it worked, or the sore is just improving on its own.

The fatigue is a little trickier. I’m anticipating feeling some fatigue, so it’s hard to tell if I would have just felt tired because I didn’t drink my usual amount of caffeine and I worked out or if the chemo is actually getting to me a bit more. If it is fatigue from the chemotherapy, it’s very subtle and nothing that stops me from doing things. It does make me want to be asleep by 8:30 pm. I wouldn’t even say the fatigue is as bad as when I was pregnant.

I am also really impressed with my hair! I thought for sure I was going to go from 100% to 60% of my hair in like two days. That doesn’t seem to be the case though! Maybe I will eventually get down to only 60% of my hair, but it seems like it is happening very gradually. It is kind of amazing to me that it’s actually working. It goes a long way from a morale perspective for sure!

Emotionally, sometimes I feel like I can’t believe I only have three weeks of treatment under my belt, because this whole ordeal has been going on for four whole months now. It’s been four months of the weight of this diagnosis, the surgeries, and the treatments. It makes me wonder about the future and the day when we do have even more efficacious treatments for cancers or even cures for some or many. How do we culturally catch up with that? Cancer still feels like such an insidious disease that many people associate with certain death (or maybe that’s just me). While not true for all cancers, many have really good treatments and excellent prognosis with early detection (including mine!). For a lot of these, they even say they are “curable.” I can only truly speak for myself, but I have to imagine I’m not alone in feeling like it’s going to be impossible to ever feel “cured” from this. There’s always worry about it coming back.

I guess cancer feels different than something like COVID. COVID proved to be deadly to certain people and could cause very extreme disease. But if you contracted COVID and made it through your illness, you were done. You weren’t worried about COVID coming back. You could always get it again, but it wasn’t going to manifest itself from the original virus inside of you to make you sick again. I suppose that’s why cancer feels different. But let’s say there was a future where we had something that was the antibiotic equivalent for cancer – culturally we would need to catch up to not being so afraid of it. It will probably take a combination of time and technological improvements in treatment and/or detection, but maybe there is a future where cancer doesn’t feel like such a devastating and frightening diagnosis. A time when people do feel reassured that it’s gone and cured. And I definitely know I’m not alone in hoping very much that that happens in my lifetime.

Other goings-ons

The cold that Maddie picked up is already significantly improved. The fever lasted until Saturday afternoon, but she responded very well with Tylenol. It was hard to keep her home on Saturday because she wasn’t good enough to go out anywhere, but she was well enough to be bouncing all around. Her cough still sounds a bit gnarly, but she is in much better spirits. We have to take her on Tuesday to get her second COVID shot and I’m really hoping that goes well. Some of our friends have said their kids developed fevers after their second shot, so we are prepared to have her not feeling great and staying home from school on Wednesday. I know I felt achey and kind of sickish after my second shot, so I hope it’s easier on her.

I’m trying to get psyched up for my next treatment on Wednesday, too. I was talking to Sean and we decided that at my halfway point, I was going to celebrate by buying some new golf clubs! My first new set of golf clubs since I was 16 years old! You want to talk about technological improvement?! I’ve discovered that golf clubs have really gotten a lot better since I was a teenager (go figure). Now that Sean is more excited about playing, maybe I would use them more than once or twice a year. Now I just need to think about which ones to get…