7.1 The REAL First Week of Treatment

My last post was titled the “The First Week of Treatment”.  I now realize that it was misnamed and poorly thought through. For a week to be a week, it has to have a specific beginning and end.  This is how I am thinking of it.  When I worked, it started Monday morning, or Sunday if I traveled, and the week was over on Friday evening. That was a week.  Now that the first week of treatment is complete, I realize that I will be passing time by Monday chemo through Friday radiation.  That’s a week complete!  And by the way, week 1 is over, 6 more to go. Yea!

I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed.  I’ve begun to realize, deep down, that beating this cancer is pretty much a full-time endeavor.  I have neck exercises, tongue exercises (yes, they do exist), special dental care, mouth rinses, the treatments themselves, consultations with a variety of doctors, nurses and specialists, dietary needs, etc. This is where I am this morning.

I had my first round of chemo on Monday.  It was 3 and half hours, with 6 or 8 drugs pumped into me.  One of them was Dexamethasone, a powerful corticosteroid. Nancy, our nurse, warned us that it may keep me awake for 2 days. Luckily it didn’t, but apparently it delays your reaction to the chemo. On Monday and Tuesday, I felt good, but Wednesday and Thursday, I felt nauseous for most the day, not horribly, but enough where it’s what I mostly think about. Today, Friday, I feel good, especially as it is the end of week 1!

I am still trying to figure out the whole nausea thing.  They prescribed nausea meds, I have marijuana products, or I can simply grind my way through it.  On Wednesday and Thursday, I just ground through it.  Thursday, I decided to walk my way out of it.  It was 50 or so, sunny and beautiful – one of those great Arizona days.  I walked for an hour or so, listening to the Hamilton soundtrack and the nausea mostly went away.  I want to save the meds for when I need the big guns.  Not sure of that’s the right strategy, but that’s my goal for the near-term.  The meds mostly just knock you out, which will be right later when the pain ratchets up.

I’m listening to some online classes on Yoga Nidra – basically meditation.  If you know me, you know that I have trouble believing in non-concrete things like… Yoga Nidra, for one.  Its premise is to relax and meditate while focusing on your inner resource, intention, and heartfelt desire, or at least that’s where I am in the videos.  Just the words — inner resource, intention, heartfelt desire — make me doubtful. I mean, seriously, what is that all about?

There are many things that make me uncomfortable about the cancer treatments, but the radiation treatments are especially difficult psychologically.  These treatments do a lot of damage to me while they’re killing the cancer.  They last about 35 minutes, much of it is the initial setup, or wait time, or setup related to moving me and the machinery around.  I’m laying on my back, with my head and shoulders under the radiation mask, completely trapped.  The beam runs 5 times during that 35 minutes, from different angles. The beam is shared by 4 different rooms of cancer patients and there is a reasonable amount of waiting in the whole process.  When it runs, you just hear some very quiet clicking and you don’t feel anything, except the fact that you are pinned down. 

The inner resource is the place you “go” to relax.  For me, that’s either a red chair near water in Nova Scotia or Cape Breton, or hugging Suzy in bed before we go to sleep.  Both of these seem to calm me down.  Now for the intention – I can only concentrate on killing the cancer – so back to my “die, cancer cells, die” mantra.  The only way I can get rid of the cancer is to have the radiation kill the cells, one by one.  My heartfelt desire is to be healthy at the end of this, and to go back to the wonderful life I had BC (before cancer).  I can imagine camping with Suzy, golfing, hiking, playing corn hole at our favorite breweries, kayaking, and everything else that was my life BC.  Even with the pandemic, I can’t wait to get back to that life, and the better one that awaits us.  I will cherish everything a bit more once Suzy and I are past all of this. I have to believe and hope.

Here and there, random acts of kindness make me emotional. Suzy and I are big baseball fans, having SF Giants Spring Training season tickets. A few months ago, with coronavirus raging, we decided when the time came, we’d keep our tickets (we have really great seats!), but not attend games. Once I was diagnosed, Spring Training was definitely over for us. The other day, we got the invoice for our 2021 tickets. I emailed our Giants ticket rep, saying I had cancer, would not be able to attend games, but wanted to come back in 2022. Greg called me about 15 minutes after I hit send, saying he couldn’t get me out of his mind, that they would of course keep our tickets for us in 2022, and that Suzy and I were in his prayers. Just writing this makes me emotional — my breathing is shallow, my throat is thick and my eyes are watering up. Suzy has the same reactions here and there. For me, these acts of kindness, or projecting myself into the future, often cause me to become overcome with emotion. I’ve just accepted this as part of who I am right now.

When I was at Accenture, they always talked about journeys. When a new project was started, it was a journey. When someone transitioned from the client to Accenture, it was a journey. I believe those weren’t journeys – THIS is a journey!!

So week one is done, six more to go.  Five radiation treatments are complete, twenty-eight to go.  One chemo session is done, five more to go.  It’s nice to be progressing.  Then, I am cancer free!!!