Stress is a side effect of cancer

I had my first migraine aura 27 years ago, in the month before I got married. My husband-to-be was a young doctor. He’d never run across a complaint of flashing lights taking over a person’s peripheral vision, so he ignored his own good medical advice (“When you hear hoof beats, don’t assume it’s a zebra.”) and secretly feared it was a brain tumor. He sent me to a neurologist to prove himself wrong.

And fortunately for me, he was wrong. Migraine auras are common, many times followed by a migraine headache. In my case, the auras are never followed by headaches, and in fact, I’ve been thankfully free of the migraine headaches I experienced as a young woman.

My auras tend to last about a half hour, gradually increasing in scope until they take over my entire field of vision. I reach a point where it’s hard to see anything through the flashing lights, and minutes later it’s over. These episodes are infrequent, typically showing up in times of stress.

Not surprisingly, I’ve had several in the past few weeks, most recently this morning. As far as I know, this is just another reaction to the stress that’s settled into every crack in my life. But I’ll report it to my doctor when I see her Monday. Headaches are also a known side effect of the anti-nausea drug I’m on, a generic form of Zofran, which means this form of migraine may qualify.

But in case the logic has escaped any in the medical community, stress is an undeniable side effect of cancer.

You asked for it; here it is…

My cranial prosthesis – shouldn’t that term refer to a brain transplant?!

If you’re looking at the picture and thinking: “So, when are you going to show us the wig?” Well, that’s exactly what I was aiming for.

Julie is the person at Devachan who specializes in wigs, extensions, and the like. She commented on how much hair the wig makers always put in.

“They probably put in too much to make sure they give you enough,” I said.

“But no-one needs that much,” she said as she thinned mine to remove the heavy look it started with. The more she worked with it, the more she appreciated its quality: well made, with really good hair. I left wearing it, wanting to give it a trial run in the real world.

This was a pretty good day. I got to visit my beloved Devachan Salon, and I was able to have lunch with my brother who works nearby. Although I carry my cancer around with me all the time, like an elephant on a leash, it remained sidelined while I enjoyed the activities of the day.

I got a few blocks from the salon and noticed in a window reflection that the wig had slid back slightly behind my hairline. Now, trust me, this slight slippage isn’t something you would notice, and certainly not someone passing me on the street. They’d be more likely to notice me tugging and pulling it back into place. But my perception hit me hard. Today I have hair of course, but next week or next month… who knows?

It was as if my attention took a momentary misstep, and in that moment I unwittingly walked headlong into the shop window!

What amazes me most is how suddenly this can happen. Mood swings from sixty-to-zero in nothing flat.

The elephant ran me over.

Planned Parenthood

I saw an ad on the subway this morning: a young woman reclining, a sensual, romantic look on her face. The caption: I’m in control of myself and my future. I use condoms.

I wanted to whip out a crayon and write: You wear condoms?!

What a false sense of security! How much control can she possibly have if she needs to rely on someone else’s compliance? And how dumb is it to expect one “catch-all” to protect against all problems? Is she more concerned about pregnancy or disease? And what about unemployment and depression and failing grades? Will condoms guard against those?

Maybe I take things too literally.

But at least the fever has broken for the time being, and I've regained my sense of irony.

What day is it anyway?

I just had the most disorienting experience!

I was feverish much of the day, starting around 11 AM. Fever spikes can occur any time during the seven days of Genasense infusion, and mine went from 101.3, when I first noticed it, to 102.9 a half hour later. I graduated from Tylenol to Advil to get it under control, and it hovered around 100° for the rest of the day.

At 5 PM, wiped out from fever in combination with the heat and humidity of the day, I took some more Advil and lay down in my clothes for a nap. Next thing I knew it was 7 o’clock.

I had slept fourteen hours, and I had missed my nightly Temodar chemotherapy pill!

I put in an off-hours call to my doctor and raced around getting ready for my 9 AM office appointment to draw blood. My doctor, and the nurse who monitors my participation in the program, are both out of town at a conference, so I called and spoke with a covering doctor who isn’t as familiar with the protocol for this trial. He looked into it and determined I should wait until tonight for the next dose. Three days into the program and already I’d flaked out!

I babbled on about sleeping fourteen hours and told him I’d be in the office later today for labs.

“You mean tomorrow,” he said.

“No, today, Thursday,” I said.

“Today’s Wednesday.”

I stared at my “Drug Diary”, still thinking it was morning, and simply could not figure out how I’d stuffed all those hours into the wrong day. I’d written notes about what side effects I had and what drugs I took, but had I made Wednesday up?

Finally I looked out the window and noticed the sun was going down, not up.

Phew... I didn’t miss my dose after all.

I could do it better

Some years ago I watched as a friend’s wife died. I didn’t know her; he was my friend. I stood by for years in relative silence and witnessed the crushing effect her illness had on him and their family.

She was furious. She couldn’t stand that it was happening to her. She found every occasion she could to remind him that she was dying, he was not, and she hated him for it. She rebuffed every attempt he made to reach out to her. What could he possibly know about it? It was her problem and she only wanted for it to go away. If he couldn't do that for her, why would she want to talk about the monster she didn’t want to face? What would be unleashed if she admitted to herself the full horror of her condition? She saw the situation as hers alone, and seemed to think that letting him love and help her would give free rein to her deepest, darkest, most devastating feelings.

I understand a little better now what drove her to those conclusions and fueled her behavior, but at the time I couldn’t imagine how she could shut her family out so completely. Conversations about her always ended in a quizzical “But…”.

And at the time I thought I could certainly do it better.

But really, I wasn’t asking for a chance to prove it.

No stranger to stress

I woke up with a headache yesterday and again this morning. The nurse assigned to oversee my participation in the clinical trial shrugs it off as a side effect of the anti-nausea drug I take before my Temodar chemo pill. She says it’s important to continue taking Tylenol every six hours, and that does help. But I don’t wake myself to take it, so by morning the headache has crept in.

That’s one theory.

In fact, it’s not unusual at all for me to wake up with a headache. Life is stressful, after all. Particularly so when billed activity is light, which it was for some time before this new problem landed in my lap. Now that I have an elephant in the room, following me around morning to night, it’s even more difficult to concentrate on client problems. Billings suffer, I worry, and I wake up with headaches.

Every day's an adventure.

Feedback

I've been getting really good feedback about this blog. Although, truth be known, I don't suppose anyone would tell me if they found it tacky, tasteless, and over-the-top TMI!

(Wikipedia definition for TMI: “Too Much Information," a slang expression indicating that someone has divulged too much personal information and made the listener uncomfortable.)

A couple of people have called it "inspiring", which comes as kind-of a surprise. Mainly I want to connect with people I know and who I know are worried for me. We all have busy lives, and it's just not feasible to be on the phone all the time.

It's also helping me maintain some distance from the problem so I can look at it a little dispassionately.

Soon after I wrote that last line to my nephew, I got on the exercise machine and heard these words in The History Boys, the movie I was watching at the time: “There’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.” The character said this in reference to a memorial for WWII soldiers, speaking about the unfathomable horror of that war.

This I know: I can manage the terror a little more effectively if I keep the monster in front of me where I can examine its details. To some degree I have to do that to keep my mind from drifting to the bigger issues.