The purpose of discussion boards is largely to give people who need support on a given topic a community that might be hard to get otherwise. Right? This is what I’m telling myself after making the tactical error of “educating myself” by visiting discussion boards for people who are receiving the same chemotherapy regimen that I’m starting Tuesday. Tomorrow. I wasn’t comforted.
All along, I’ve been concentrating on the regimen I just finished, because that was what was at hand. This next phase I categorized in my head vaguely, as the description my doctor initially gave me: “less intense.” But as Tuesday drew closer, I started to get curious. How do people feel? Do they just feel normal? I know some people experience peripheral neuropathy, or tingling in the hands and feet, but how common is that? Do they feel anything else? Maybe I should just go online and see what other patients have to say… maybe I’ll find out most people thought it was pretty easy?
But people who are having an easy time with a treatment, or anything for that matter, don’t generally feel the need to find others in similar situations. They don’t need to reach out. They don’t have the same needs of community and commiseration. They don’t go online and say, “Hey, I’m concerned because I’m feeling so normal… anyone else out there feeling like that?” So what I found was more like worst-case scenarios. I hope. These people experienced things like chronic bone pain (both achinesss and random, shooting pains), continued hair loss (not much left to lose), constant watering of the eyes and nose, nose bleeds, fingernail and toenail loss (this really grosses me out), loss of feeling in the hands and feet, severe fatigue, general “yuckiness,” heart failure. So, not super fun. And the treatment is weekly for 12 weeks, apparently getting worse as time goes on. By then, summer is over, the weather has changed, the semester is half over. It’s a lot to think about. To worry about. To dread, causing me to see Tuesday as this scary unknown that is coming for me.
Tomorrow also would have been my brother’s 55th birthday. A big one. I was feeling really down about commemorating it by sitting in the chemo chair. Then, my clinical supervisor suggested that I think of it as honoring his memory by caring for myself, getting the treatment I need. And really, that is particularly appropriate for this regimen. One of the drugs I will be getting specifically targets the type of breast cancer I have. Apparently, my cancer makes an excess of a protein called HER2. This, in turn, makes my cancer more aggressive. The drug, Herceptin, goes after only the cells that create that protein. So it feels more strategic than the other, less discriminatory drugs I get. The ones that go after all of my cells.
So, I will take my supervisor’s advice and sit in that chair in honor of Mike tomorrow. I will hope that I will be one who doesn’t need a discussion board because my symptoms get so bad. And mostly, I will believe that the Herceptin (and the other one, the Taxol), will do everything we’re intending, and that 20 years from now when I’m thinking about Mike on his birthday, I’ll be cancer-free, with a glass of wine and not chemotherapy.
nopinkribbonsplease 