Whatever Gets You Thru the Night…

 Day 12 - The Chemo Muse Moves In

 

General status update

Hair: still there, but it usually starts to fall out between days 9-14 of the first chemo cycle, and I am now on day 11, so both Hair and I increasingly anxious. No sign yet, however, of the painful scalp-tingling which apparently signals imminent hair loss.

 

Nausea demon: fighting back a bit today, as I got overconfident and careless and went for too long between doses of the meds – he was in like Flynn.

Chemo Muse: has unpacked, done the ironing, written a Petrarchan sonnet, and is about to go for a run.

Anxiety level (1-10): took Lorazepam last night to ensure some sleep; this makes you the opposite of anxious. Whatever that is. Unanxious, I expect.

State of mind: liquid jelly, pomegranate flavour. It’s the drugs, dude.

 

Yesterday I got up at 5.30 a.m., my mind buzzing with ideas, and worked at my computer through the whole day - with only short breaks for refreshment and the ingestion of various pharmaceuticals – until about 9 p.m., writing, editing and publishing yesterday’s lengthy, scent of decomposing rat-infused blog post, some 2,200 words in length.

Given that I have cancer, and am in the middle of my first chemotherapy cycle with its attendant unpleasantnesses, this Stakhanovite work rate is taking a lot of people by surprise, not least myself, and gives rise to the question of where the hell all this insane (and entirely uncharacteristic) mental energy is coming from; as Big Sis Fo put it with her customary directness when she called me earlier today for a chat: ‘Caroline, WHAT THE HOLY F*** ARE YOU ON?’

By the way, my sister mentioned in passing that the MC was in the kitchen experimenting with beetroot macaroons (yes, you read that correctly) for possible inclusion in his pre-lunch canapé selection on Christmas Day. They are to be served with smoked salmon and horseradish sauce, apparently. I will try to keep you updated with any further exciting canapé innovation news from north Yorkshire as it happens.

My sister asked this not just because I am writing so much, but because she has heard me talking for the last few days in what my OH has tactfully called an ‘effervescent’ manner – I know that I am speaking about twice as fast as I normally do, with great urgency, and a certain amount of hilarity. The general consensus of the entire Fo family is that I appear to be hopped up to the gills on amphetamines – but I’m not, I’m really not.

They give you steroids for the first three days of chemo, but I stopped taking them over a week ago, so it’s definitely not the Dexamethasone. So that brings up the question of all the other meds I’m now on, and to one very strange facet of being treated for cancer. At this stage, I’ve almost forgotten about the cancer: my on-going battle, for the next 17 weeks, is with the chemotherapy drugs, and their side effects, and the side effects of the drugs they give you to counter the side effects of the chemo, and so on ad infinitum.

Last week, before having chemotherapy treatment for the first time, I was feeling perfectly well: the cancer had been cut out of me, I’d had a few weeks to recover physically and mentally from the operation, and I’d even been able to go swimming a couple of times. I was sleeping through the night again (inability to sleep is very common in the first couple of months after a cancer diagnosis), and feeling just about as well as you could do, in the circumstances. I was as ready, mentally and physically, for chemo as I would ever be.

A week later, and I had become a tormented lab rat, in a state of extreme physical discomfort and agitation, running round and round inside my cage in a frenzy of distress. Hand in hand with the unrelenting, overwhelming and debilitating nausea came a feeling of constant agitation, mental hyperactivity and general SPEEDINESS, and unless I take a sedative, I just cannot seem to slow down.

There is a voice in my head, constantly, a narrative voice which seems quite independent of me, somehow, observing what I’m going through, commenting on it and then demanding that I write it all down. Now. This voice simply WILL NOT SHUT UP, except with the help of Lorazepam, and then as soon as I wake up again it continues as if it had never been silenced.

 I mentioned this bizarre phenomenon to a friend, who said not to worry, all inspiration is good, but added thoughtfully that should, by any chance, the voice start telling me to do anything other than writing, say, to give a random and entirely hypothetical example,  should it urge me to go after my loved ones with a carving knife, it might be wise to seek medical help immediately, might it not?

I assured her that if such an eventuality arose, I would do exactly that.

So, in addition to the Nausea Demon, I seem to have acquired a new long-term guest, the Chemo Muse. 

There are now 3 of us in this relationship, and we’re all going to have find some way of co-existing for the next 90 days, as neither of them is showing any inclination to make their visit a brief one. I had anticipated drowsing my way through chemo and its attendant crippling fatigue with lots of sofa time, napping, reading and watching boxed sets of The Killing, but that is quite evidently NOT going to happen.

The Nausea Demon is now more or less under control as long as I remember to take my meds on time, but the Chemo Muse is under no such restraint; as soon as I wake up, she wants to talk. She’s all excited, happy, impatient, pouring into my head a constant stream of ideas for blog posts, and snappy titles, and suggesting issues around cancer and its treatment which it might be useful to discuss.

The Chemo Muse won’t shut up, and she keeps nagging at me to make a written note of what she’s saying, IMMEDIATELY, lest I forget a single detail. The other day, walking down the road on the way to the Brook Green Tesco, I found myself stopping and scribbling down several pages of notes, my notebook perched on top of a handily sized stone gatepost. The Chemo Muse is like a Twitter feed running constantly through my head – and indeed, some of what she says goes straight down on to my own Twitter feed.

I don’t know what is causing this, but I have to embrace it: it’s a hell of a lot better than lying on the sofa for the next 90 days thinking about the nausea, listening to my hair fall out, and sobbing over The Pity of It All, but it’s really quite wearing. While I’m awake, there is no down-time: the Nausea Demon down in my stomach, and the Chemo Muse up in my head, are at it, hammer and tongs, through the hours of wakefulness, which are long, as I wake at 5am, my brain bursting with ideas; thank God they’ve given me the Lorazepam, which needs to be used with caution but does ensure that in extremis I can shut up the Chemo Muse and get some sleep by the simple expedient of knocking myself out.

The Chemo Muse isn’t like me, my normal self: she’s hyperactive, on the go from morning till night, full of energy, always looking for the next thing to do. The Chemo Muse is not interested in sofas, or having a little nap and no, she doesn’t want to sit down with a nice mug of tea and a digestive and read the paper for a bit. She wants to GET ON and DO STUFF, especially writing about the experience of chemo.

I have a good friend back in Turkey, an American friend, T, who is the living embodiment of the phrase ‘a ball of energy’. I have always been impressed by, and in awe of, her phenomenal energy levels, constant purposeful activity, and the amount she achieves every day – and could only think that there must be a genetic reason for this, that her body must have a much speedier basic metabolic setting than mine. T leads life at a pace I could only begin to imagine – at least until the Chemo Muse moved in last week. Now, for the first time, I have some sense of what it is to be my friend T.

I’m enjoying it, and going along for the ride, as long as it lasts - once the Fatigue Demon arrives, as he surely will, he may have the power to shut down the Chemo Muse altogether.

 

Nor am I enquiring too closely into whether the appearance of Chemo Muse IS simply a pharmaceutical artefact or whether, as another friend suggested, she might be a coping mechanism, a way of my brain helping me to bear the horror of what has happened to my life in the last few months, and the knowledge of what the chemo is now doing to me, and will continue to do, only more so, over the next 90 days.

Explanation, I’ve decided, and precise delineation of cause and effect, are not really important here: the Chemo Muse has come as a completely unexpected, but very useful guest, and she is welcome to stay for the duration. And let’s just file her, as suggested by John Lennon, under the category of ‘Whatever gets you thru the night…’