I had a rough night's sleep last night. You know that anxiety one gets the night before something exciting happens? Usually, the excitement is "good," like a visit from Santa, or a trip to the beach.
Yes, I am oddly "excited" about starting chemo. It sounds weird to you, I know. It feels weird to me. I'm not excited, like today's my birthday and I'm having a big party. I'm excited, like I'm in uncharted waters, like I don't know what's going to happen next, like things could go perfectly well or horribly wrong, and I get to roll with either direction. I have no control over whether this concoction of systematic poison is going to work well or not at all.
Make no mistake, my oncologist is slowly poisoning me...On purpose.... In the vague hope that it'll kill my alien invader & make me better-ish. The funny part, for me, is that I totally don't feel sick right now. I feel like I've always felt. Once I get three chemo drugs in my system, the feeling-sick and being-sick aspects will start to align, then diverge again as my body (hopefully) responds to the drugs.
I'm scared for this part. The part where I'm no longer in control of what I can get my body to do, how I won't be able to simply will my physical self into submission/cooperation, where I can't go and do things whenever I feel the whim.
I'm scared of chemo-brain. I'm scared that I'll pick up an "easy" crossword puzzle, like the kind I can do now in ink, and I won't be able to find the answers in my own head. Or I'll try to do a Sudoku and it just won't make sense anymore. Or I'll search my mental thesaurus for a word and will find nothing.
I compare this fear to the despair (on a much smaller scale, of course,) to "Flowers for Algernon." If you've never read this short story, please do. I read it in middle school over 20 years ago, and it stuck with me.
At any rate, regardless if I feel the effects of diminished mental capacity, I can still get this shirt... because it's funny as hell.
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