Recovering from surgery seemed like it was a learning experience, but the treatments from chemo therapy were a whole other mind fuck. Yes, it sucked, in fact it is safe to say that its the worse thing I’ve had to sit through in my life. No marathon, tough race, tough beat down, intense training session, wild hangover, or sickness I’ve had was anything like Chemo. Chemo was slow, it became gradually more of an experience every time I received a treatment. The runs of five days in a row, 3-4 hours a day of medicine left me full to the brim. My body felt like a giant water balloon, and the queeziness and the aches seemed like they’d never leave, it was a total mind fuck. All in all I’m still standing here saying that I’m lucky, I’m blessed, God had a plan for me. Through all of this I’ve been very aware how quickly things can change from treatable to bad news, like real bad news, all of this was still temporary. From the beginning they constantly assured me that everything was still treatable. The only thing with that was every check point we had gotten to by now put me at a higher stage of cancer, this made it hard for me to hear that I was still treatable when it seemed like we got worse news anytime I met with any doctor.
There were two main things that got me through each treatment:
1) knowing I was one closer to being done. Kind of like marking off days on a calendar. Counting down from 28 and seeing the number go down slowly somehow was comforting for me.
2) I prayed my ass off boy! I was raised Catholic so most of how I’ve been taught other than speaking directly to God is by reciting memorized prayers. Mainly I prayed the rosary, many Hail Mary’s and many Our Fathers. Any time I didn’t know where my mind needed to go when my body wasn’t serving me I would be saying my prayers over and over in my head. Praying for myself, praying for my family, and praying for other friends and people I knew going through things themselves.
Slowly I lost my hair, my beard, most body hair, my eyebrows and my eyelashes. I got to keep my leg hairs and arm hairs though, prolly because I’m mexican. My nails began to turn a bruised black color. I actually gained weight because of all the liquids, but I would fluctuate gaining and losing 10-12 lbs sometimes in a weekends time. There were wild body aches which I’m still getting used to not having. Intense ear ringing which I guess will stay with me for a while, watering eyes, queeziness but no throwing up so just mouth fulls if saliva back to back, and the most recent one is forgetfulness which they call chemo fog. I also got an overall feeling of being so tired for no reason. I only had to throw up twice which I’m stoked about, haha I had so many meds for nausea, thank you SLO oncology!