Life of a Chemo Patient

At 5.30 this morning, cramp alert!! It hadn’t happened in months, but it seems that the last couple of days my sensitivity for cramps has increased. It’s always my calves, this morning the right one. The headache that followed kept me awake.

Starting this blog was almost on impulse, although the concept had gone through my mind very often and many of my friends told me I should write down my experiences, if not my life. This morning, in my bed, awake, I realised why I started it. Every cancer patient suffers from the side effects of chemo therapy. But the impact of the cancer, not only physically but above all mentally and emotionally, is in most cases so enormous that in comparison all the rest seems “trivial”.
In my case, that whole perception process has been somewhat different, but I will come back to that in later entries.

When you undergo chemo treatment you are a cancer patient. Your relatives, your friends, all are shocked, compassionate, supportive. Although awful, the treatment serves a good cause, it might cure you, at least for a while, from that devastating thing called cancer. For me, in hindsight, the most shocking experience was that I did not feel sick from the cancer. I was in lots of pain and discomfort (no rush, the details will follow in due course), but I did not feel sick.

Nor did I feel sick during the chemo. I did not have to embrace porcelain, on the contrary, the pills to avoid it made me nauseous. But very soon into the process I realised that they were killing my body. Bit by bit, all kinds of functions started to disappear. Especially my legs.

Now, 2 years later, I’m still not sick. The cancer has, at least for now, left the building, but I’m still a patient. Not of cancer, but of chemo. In the way my body actually recovered from the chemo, little seems to have changed in the last 12 months. Granted, 2 years ago, at the end of the treatment, I was almost completely paralysed from the waist down. So walking with a stick is a blessing. Says who?

And that’s why I write this blog. Because for me, for my relatives, for my friends, it should be over by now, it should have been back to normal, or at least close to it. Two years after treatment you should have improved, especially if that thing has done what is was supposed to do, leave, if possible without a trace, as in my case. For your doctors you stop being a patient, there is no chemocologist.

However, that’s not how it works. What needs to be told is that the story seems to remain the same, even if the details are different every day, and for me it starts each morning with my legs.

~ by lodewijk bos on November 22, 2008.

Posted in actuality