Hello dearies. Today, I write to you from my parents house in Oklahoma as I am visiting for the Memorial Day holiday while my husband parties it up all weekend at the bachelor party of a dear friend of his. I hope he lives through the experience because that 5 1/2 hour drive back to Kansas City really sucks when doing it by yourself.
I realize I have again fallen behind on my posts. I blame this in part on the fact that this was by far the roughest chemo week yet. Not only am I accumulating exhaustion and toxins in my system, but I'm having some sort of allergy/sinus issue as well. Not a good combo.
On Monday, I had chemo treatment number four. This is exciting for two reasons, the first of which being that it marks the halfway point for me. Yes, that's right, 4 down, 4 to go! The second reason that this is exciting is that I now switch over to a different chemo drug for the remainder of the treatment schedule.
For the last four treatments, I have been getting what they call A/C treatments. A/C refers to Adriamycin and Cytoxin. I get both drugs each treatment and my oncologist initially scheduled four of these for me. I have now completed my A/C treatments! Now, it's time to switch over to Taxol treatments and I will have four of those as well. I'm told by the nurses that some of my side effects may be much diminished for the next four. I will still be tired of course, but there's a chance that my killer headaches won't happen anymore and I won't have to spend three straight days tanked on Vicodin. This is exciting for me.
In addition to hitting the halfway point, I also set up all the dates for my treatments from here on out. At this point, it looks like my last chemo treatment will be July 20! It's nice to have a date in mind and have a focal point to shoot for. For those keeping track, that is less than 2 months away! This is also exciting for me.
So, rough as this week was, it was nice to have hit another landmark...the halfway point. Although, that said, I have had an interesting development this week. I'm not sure whether it's the mixture of the Adriamycin, Cytoxin, Vicodin, the 3 anti-nausea drugs I took this week, and the Benedryl I'm taking for the allergies/sinuses, or whether I'm just totally mentally losing it, but I've started having relatively disturbing dreams about cancer. I'm going to go ahead and say it's the drug combo because I've always had messed up dreams on allergy meds and with all that other stuff thrown in, it's not really surprising.....
Anyway, so these dreams I'm having are essentially my subconscious (and conscious but unspoken) fears rearing their ugly heads in dream form. I never remember dreams all that vividly so the retelling of this will be subpar, but here is an example from last night. Last night I had a dream that I went in to see the oncologist (who up to this point in real life has been very positive about my progress) and he explained to me that the chemo was actually having an opposite effect on me, increasing thickening in the breast tissue, and subsequently causing the cancer to spread to my lungs.
Now, I'm relatively certain it wouldn't (and couldn't) happen that way, but I woke up freaked out in a cold sweat nonetheless. Mental quandary brought on by this experience:
Option 1: Deal with allergies/sinuses and feel crappy all the time or
Option 2: Wake up irrationally terrified about cancer
I suppose I'll go with option 2 based on the fact that I feel crappy enough already. Sigh.
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