Crappity Crap Crap

This is how I feel. Well, minus the smile.

Chemo is NOT FUN.

I know that's a no-brainer. Everyone understands that chemo sucks. The problem is, everyone doesn't know how it's going to suck. The reality is so much worse than what you imagine it to be. It's also different, depending on what kind of chemo you're doing. Different kinds of extreme suckage.

Going in to this whole thing, I was brave. I was fearless. I knew it was going to be bad and I was going to FACE IT. Without flinching.

Um. Yeah.

There's been a ton of flinching. The treatments are kicking my @$$ from here to Sunday.

I know I've listed a lot of the side effects already, but words pale in comparison to the experience of it all. For me, the physical stuff is bad, but the mental effects are much worse. I'm not proud of this, but I'm intellectually arrogant. There's an unspoken voice in my head that tells me that I'm the smartest person in the room. I know. Yikes.

Now, I know this isn't true when I think about it consciously. But I am an intelligent person whose identity is kind of wrapped up in that intelligence. Chemo messes with that in a big way.

Let me try to explain it. Have you read Flowers for Algernon? There's this guy who has an experiment done on him. He starts out as mentally handicapped, then becomes a genius due to whatever it is they do to him. Then, he reverts. With his beyond Mensa-level brain, he observes himself going back to his original handicapped state. It's horrifying.

And that's how chemo brain feels.

It's like a thick fog that I can't pierce. Or, actually, I can. But only for moments at a time. When I force myself to focus, I can find brief clarity, but then it gets worse right after. For someone who sees himself as smart, it's a total nightmare.

Part of it is an extreme sluggishness of thought process. Some of it is more visceral. There's this weird directional thing that happens to me. Like up and down and right and left lose all meaning. I have to focus to make sure I'm reaching down instead of up, if that makes sense. It's really disorienting.

Sounds pretty dreadful, right?

Here's the thing. As I was describing all of this to my wife, she said, "Yep. Sounds like being pregnant." And it dawned on me. As bad as this is, pregnancy is worse. And have you seen some of the things women manage to do when they're pregnant?

I have a tough time just getting out of bed. But my wife worked while she was pregnant with our first child. It was a physically demanding job, too.

So while I whine about how much chemo sucks, women are constantly just sucking it up. If there was ever a doubt in my mind, that doubt has evaporated. Women are so much stronger than men.

Todd, man. He's an ass, but he's continually teaching me compassion.
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Next up, a treatise on stool softeners.

Means something completely different now, doesn't it?

Next post.