cancer – day 165

Sometimes I feel like I’m running out of things to write about. Each day is marginally better now in terms of my feeling slightly less lost and fogged out of my own brain, though all the side effects continue to shift, some lessening, some worsening, some things reappearing that I keep hoping I am done with. Like night sweats.

I haven’t had too much trouble with hot flashes, at least not severe ones. Tonight I’m constantly much too warm or much too cold, and I guess it’s coming in waves that could be considered hot flashes. But not HOT like unbearably hot I’m going to sweat into a puddle on the floor in the next thirty seconds, which is what I understand a bad hot flash to be like.

Trying to sleep at night, however, now THERE are some extremes. I’m generally much too warm when I go to bed and try to keep the ceiling fan on as long as possible to cool the room as much as possible before actually going to sleep. More often than not though, also having a lot to do with the reason I often am up more than half the night after the chemo week 1 most-heavily drugged state has passed . . . by 3AM I often wake up so completely boiling that I’ve sweat completely through my nightshirt and soaked my pillow and sheets so that my whole side of the bed is just an unbearably wet muck that can’t be slept in. So I get up for a while, and this is where my long sleepless nights come in, because once I’m awake, it’s incredibly difficult for me to fall asleep again. I’m one of those ridiculously light sleepers. Which didn’t matter when I lived alone in the woods a year ago, heck, even just over six months ago, but has some significant drawbacks trying to stay here in a city where there’s traffic and garbage trucks and people who snore, and, well, just a lot of noise that I am not accustomed to anymore, as well as a complete lack of the white noise I used to have to sleep to every night with the fans and the quiet constant forest sounds. Wind in the trees, now there’s a sound to sleep all night to. Why do people want to live in these crowded noisy places anyway? I’m here because I have to be. Will I stay when it’s no longer necessary for my cancer treatment? Maybe, part-time, depending on other life changes that seem to be happening around the fringes of what my life may be like next year (meaning, January 2009) after the grueling cancer treatments are over. The only real change I know of being that GGU wants me to teach one night a week in San Francisco again, which I hadn’t really been planning on so soon but if what they say about how I’m supposed to be feeling by then is accurate, I should be ok to do it. Just means a little more careful planning of my Chain work to make sure I don’t have any loose ends on Wednesday nights. The rest of it I do on the weekends so the timing doesn’t matter. The scary part of going into next year is that they tell you to expect cancer treatment recovery to take approximately twice as long as your cancer treatment lasted. So, my cancer treatment has lasted from early May through end of December, 2008, about seven months. Which means I should be feeling normal and healthy (pre-cancer normal?) about fourteen months after that. March, 2010. And that’s assuming I don’t have other debilitating side effects from the five years of hormone therapy they want to start me on as soon as radiation treatment is over. They’re not kidding when they say you’ll never be the same again after cancer. Whatever you end up, it’s certainly not going to be exactly what you were before diagnosis and treatment. It’s too much to go through not to have it wreak havoc on what your life was before, and what it will be in the future. Like with the neuropathy. It’s possible this will settle into permanent damage, and I’ll never be able to dance well again. Ever. And poof, there’s a big part of my last five years lost to a physical disability I never would have imagined developing before cancer treatment. And, of course, no more teaching dance lessons if that happens. So, new life stuff will have to fill in the gaps. Who knows what that stuff will be.

I’m rambling. This entry was actually supposed to be about night sweats. So, anyway. Well, after I wake up at 3AM soaking wet, then I have to get out of bed and change into something dry. I’ve gotten in the habit of keeping everything I need right there on the floor next to the bed so I can either try to change just my night shirt and hope to go back to sleep, or, more typically, get completely warmly dressed in sweats with socks and a hood or hat and everything to come back to the office (because it’s cold back here at night) and mess around on the computer or read. At six my meds alarm goes off so I take that medicine and keep doing whatever, usually I’m doing my daily Rune around then. And the 6AM med includes reglan, which makes me sick to my stomach if don’t eat something within half an hour, so that’s usually followed by a little breakfast English muffin with peanut butter or something, then soon enough my alarm goes off to go wake Mark (when I do sleep through, we use my alarm because it doesn’t scare the living daylights out of me when it goes off because it’s a quiet slow song for an alarm), so then I go wake up Mark for work and put some tea on and then we’re pretty much into the day with me having had about three hours of sleep thanks to waking up with night sweats (well, and being a light sleeper in general who has a hard time falling asleep in the first place and can’t fall back asleep after waking up from something like night sweats). So I go around all fatigued like a zombie all day, and try to nap whenever there’s the slightest chance I can fall asleep. Problem being, I can be falling asleep sitting at my desk reading on the computer screen, but by the time I get off the chair and onto the lovesac to snooze, I’m wide awake again because I had to move around. I tell ya, being wired as a light sleeper has some serious drawbacks sometimes.

Anyway, that’s my rant for tonight. Night sweats. I’m already expecting it’ll happen tonight, because I’m constantly hot and cold just sitting here now. But tomorrow I have a long appointment starting at 9:30 in the morning, with the new radiation oncologist, and Mark can’t go with me to help take notes because he has a meeting, so I need to get my game on for that and be alert and be able to ask all the questions I asked six months ago the last time I had a radiation oncologist consult. Yeah right, like I’m one-tenth as alert now as I was back then. A twentieth even? Nope, not even close. Thank goodness I still have my notes from the last one. And I’d better figure out tonight where I’m going when in the morning, just in case there’s some fluke sleep-through-the-night situation and I don’t have three or five unexpected hours to prepare in the morning. . .