Cancer Blog #11
By Brian Zimmerman
Begun on July 31, 2021
Email: dyingman1@yahoo.com
My Dying Words
Entry #11
September 14, 2021
More Side Effects
I realized I have not said enough about side effects from the chemo. I’ve had people ask how it feels to be on chemo. Here’s my response: “Imagine you wake up in the morning and your head feels fuzzy, you can’t focus, you’re severely nauseated, diarrhea, legs feel rubbery, you’re unsteady, weak. It might not be because you drank too much the night before. It might be because you’re on chemo.” It always gets a laugh, but there’s no way to easily describe chemo as everyone’s experience seems so different.
They Change Every Day
The reason I wanted to broach this subject again was to discuss how mine have mutated over time. Really, almost every day my symptoms change: sometimes dramatically, sometimes subtly. Here’s some samples of changes I’ve experienced over the past 3 weeks or so: I mentioned that I lost my fingerprints in an earlier entry: now the skin on my hands and feet (especially the feet) peel more and more. I’m using Bag Balm on my hands at night, and wear white cotton work gloves to keep from getting the goo all over me and the bed. Every time I get up to use the bathroom (which is roughly every 2 hours – hey, I’m an old man and that’s what old men do), I take off the gloves and when I get back in bed, I reapply the Bag Balm and don the gloves. Has it helped? Not much, but at least they haven’t cracked open and started to hurt and bleed. They just look ugly. Similar with my feet. I apply Bag Balm when I get dressed in the morning and always put on socks, even if I am wearing only slide sandals. I put a second coating of Bag Balm after showering in the evening and don the socks again. I even wear the socks to bed at night.
As you can tell, a lot of my life revolves around treating the symptoms. It seems to take forever to get dressed and perform my morning ablutions.
Of course, the chemo usually causes me to have very low endurance, another reason for everything taking so long.
New Side Effects
Another new symptom that just started last week was that anything that I bit down on that was the slightest bit cold made all my teeth ache – and I mean ache. I bit into a banana (room temperature, obviously) yesterday morning and it brought tears to my eyes when my teeth started to ache. I can drink something cold and it doesn’t seem to bother my teeth, but eating some cold – forget about it.
I also noticed some time back that my left hip flexor muscle wasn’t working correctly. Your hip flexor is the muscle that lifts your knee (I know I’m oversimplifying all this discussion, so no need to email me to point that out). I found it out when trying to don my socks. When I lifted my right knee, I could easily get it high enough to reach my foot to put on the sock. When I lifted my left knee, I couldn’t lift it high enough to reach my foot; I had bend down to grab it with my right hand and pull it up. I could hold it there long enough to don the sock, so there wasn’t anything wrong with my hip range of motion, just motor control. I’m guessing a central nervous system effect from the chemo.
Last point: I had my 6th IV session yesterday, and the oncology NP dropped my two chemo drugs (one in the IV and one orally) by about 20%. It made a very significant difference: I can already see a small improvement in the peeling on my hands, my nausea is less, and I feel stronger and more alert than I have since beginning chemo. In fact, today (the day after the chemo IV session), I took my car to get the battery changed, and then later lifted weights with my wife. She was impressed at least!
I think she kept the immunotherapy drug at the same dosage level, but left me on 10 mg of Prednisone to mitigate the side effects and so far, they seem to be less than last time, which is a huge relief.
Your Mileage May Vary
One last note: It’s very difficult to predict how your body will react to chemo drugs. Take the effect on my hemoglobin. Here’s my hemoglobin measurements from the beginning of my chemo treatments:
4/30: 14.0 gm/dl
5/14: 13.8
5/21: 13.9
6/11: 12.3
6/28: 14.1
7/19: 12.2
7/26: 12.4
8/9: 12.4
8/23: 10.5
8/30: 11.1
9/13: 14.7
As you can see, my hemoglobin slowly dropped to around 12 gm/dl, which was somewhat below normal (normal is 13.7 to 17.5) but nothing to worry about, over the course of several months. Then, there was a sudden drop to 10.5 on 8/23, which was disheartening. If it got much lower, I suspect they would have suspended the chemo treatments. But, there was a surprising jump up to 11.1 on 8/30. Not a lot, but in the right direction. It was around then that my wife and I let the oncologist know we were going to the beach the week of September 4 through 11 (Saturday to Saturday) and so wanted to skip the next IV treatment session (planned for August 30). As I’m diagnosed “treatable not curable”, he was good with that. I returned for my next treatment the Monday I got back from the beach. During that 5 week hiatus (from August 9’s IV treatment session to my return for an IV session on September 13), my hemoglobin rebounded an astonishing 3.6 gm/dl to 14.7 gm/dl! My jaw dropped when they reported my hemoglobin level. So, I guess my bone marrow during that interval had made an incredible come back (I told the oncology NP that I attributed it to plenty of craft beer and a daily cigar while we were at the beach. She laughed so hard she was practically crying. But, no admonition to stop either. I had previously asked during the diagnostic period numerous doctors – PCP, two pulmonologists, a gastroenterologist, and my oncologist if my smoking cigars could have caused my cancer. The answer was always the same: No!).
Final Advice
So, my advice is to never take any one lab test as the final word. You never know what prayer and following their advice might accomplish! And, if you don’t like the side effects you’re experiencing today, just wait till tomorrow. They probably will change!