General status update
Hair: Seems
to be falling out less than usual, if anything. Am beginning to wonder if the
follicles are still in shock from the chemo; perhaps when they finally wake up,
the whole lot will just all fall out at once. This is pretty much what happened
to one of my virtual ‘Starting Chemo in December’ Buddies, who started a week
before me – she was devastated. She didn’t do the cold cap, though.
Nausea demon: Still
doing his stuff – If I slip up and leave too long between doses of the
anti-emetic drugs, he’s like a cat waiting to pounce.
Chemo Muse: she
defeated sleep almost entirely for 2 weeks, but now sleep is starting to fight
back.
Sleep, lack of: Now
chronically sleep-deprived, and not functioning very well, after several nights
of going to bed at 3 or 4 am – this is going to be remedied tonight by a dose
of Lorazepam, Morpheus’s chosen pharmaceutical. Unfortunately, this will mean a
very groggy Christmas Day, but it can’t be helped: I MUST get some sleep.
Anxiety level
(1-10): too tired to be anxious, but if I weren’t I’d be very anxious about being
so tired.
State of mind: I
just want to lie down in my Hobbit-hole and go to sleep for a very, very long
time.
Since I started this blog on the day before my first
dose of chemo two weeks ago, I have published a post every day, and written some
15,000 words, including this post, which is half as long again as my MSc dissertation;
at this rate, by the time I finish chemo the total word count will approximate that of a D.Phil thesis. The blog has now had about 4,500 hits, and has readers in the USA, Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, Turkey, Spain, France, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, India, South Africa and the Cayman
Islands, as well as the UK.
There is no such a thing as a free lunch, and the
downside of the manic mental energy I have been experiencing over the last 2 weeks
is an inability to sleep; after many wakeful nights I am so exhausted that it
is quite hard right at this minute to focus my mind long enough to write
coherent sentences. Today has been a
sofa day, pretty much, but I have been too tired even to read. So a proper blog post is not really on the
cards and besides, I have been ordered by the powers that be to get some rest
before I collapse completely.
I have 7 days left before I go back to the hospital for the next dose of the chemo - or FEC 2, as it's known in the trade - and then they'll be giving me more steroids, and the whole thing hyperactivity will start all over again. I MUST get some rest, slow down and become more functional before we have to start the chemo cycle all over again.
I have 7 days left before I go back to the hospital for the next dose of the chemo - or FEC 2, as it's known in the trade - and then they'll be giving me more steroids, and the whole thing hyperactivity will start all over again. I MUST get some rest, slow down and become more functional before we have to start the chemo cycle all over again.
So in a minute I’m going to go and lie down, but I’ll
leave you with a interesting historical artefact from the Fo photographic archive:
This one was not posed by a model; the girl on the left is - or was, once upon a time - actually me.
It's hard now to believe that I was ever that young...
We made it to the quarter finals of University Challenge and yes, Bamber
Gascoigne was delightful.
