Rhythms of Treatment

Halfway through the third treatment period, I am learning the cycles of how my body handles the chemo. The day of I am not uncomfortable so much as just out of it. Then a couple of days where the steroids have me pumped up and I feel weird, but good. Then some mild mouth soreness for a few days. About five days after chemo I get aches, mostly in my arms and back. During the day they don't bother me, but at night, of course, I use them as an opportunity to not sleep. (Check out Leslie What's blog for a nice discussion of not sleeping.)

The last couple of days I'm pretty much completely normal.

All of this is realy easy to tolerate, but the first cycle, it was all a little scary. You know, the hypervigilant thing. Now, it's kind of no big deal. I know that the Tylenol won't really do much for the aches, so I will have to break down and take a Motrin, even though it mildly depresses white blood count. Life is amazingly mundane.

Funny thing, that. Here I am having this rather life altering experience and mostly it feels about as exotic as going to the grocery. We homo sapiens are an adaptable bunch, I guess. What am I really worried about? Thanks to David Moles, I am now worried about antibiotic resistent bacteria. I'm already buying meat that was raised without antibiotics, but David has a link to a Bruce Sterling column which makes it all so...horrifyingly Sterlingesque. And me with a punk immune system