Today was a meeting with the oncologist. It is also the Thursday of my week off from chemo. I should have felt pretty good and had energy. Neither was true. In fact, I spent the afternoon sleeping very deeply. I slept most if not all the afternoon. A deep, very wonderful sleep. When I woke up I felt like I was drugged.

I felt awful and had absolutely no explanation for that. I eventually took some of my anti nausea medicine. The logic was simple; when I can't figure out what I am feeling see if there is some angle to tie it to nausea. I have talked about this before, how the nausea manifests itself in so many ways. What finally convinced me it was nausea was that I felt a little like I had consumed something that did not agree with me, at all. Finally after about an hour of waiting to see what was going to happen I started feeling better. My conclusion from all of this is that chemo is cumulative, it builds up in your system and it has staying power far beyond what I had suspected. Of course this means that the next round of chemo is going to be fairly devastating and that it will take some time to get over. News that is pretty much devastating to me. On the other hand it means too that the chemo has far more effect on the cancer than just a few days of being in my system.

My bald head has started peeling from the sunburn of last Friday. I never knew my skin could shed so much. It is a constant snowstorm of skin flakes. I rub and rub and rub and still skin flakes come off. My wife is not amused. She doesn't say much about it but I know she thinks I am some sort of macho twit and that I will be like that regardless. She understands me well and that bodes well for our marriage. A deep understanding of each other and our foibles goes along way to making a strong marriage. Especially at a time when so much vulnerability is coming out. I am pretty much being taken apart piece by piece, closely examined, and reassembled by this cancer. And I see no end in sight for it.

I have determined that I will likely be in treatment for some time. I figure I have an 85% likelihood that this round of chemo will not be all that is necessary to cure the cancer or cause it to go away. More likely there will follow on sessions and they will be every bit as nasty and miserable as this round, if not more so. I say that because my doctors are being very cagey and they keep implying that this is serious and it will take a long time to manage if there is to be a happy outcome. I am not ruling out that the cancer can be managed, no, more likely there is a 14% chance that this round did impede the cancer, and a 1% chance that the cancer will go away as a result of this round of chemo. So I settled in for the long haul and recognize that I am a long way from being out of the woods. My bet is a follow on chemo series starting in July. Realizing it is going to be a long fight prepares me for the long harsh experience ahead of me.

Good news is that I have put on ten pounds now. My color is good and my mental state is pretty good. Bad news is everybody is worried about me slipping into depression. So far I don't believe that is the case. But I can see where at some point I am going to get discouraged. This cancer episode has just about erased all semblance of normalcy for me and I know that at some point I am going to lose patience and possibly hope. I just tell myself that this has been the easy part so far and that the real crap is yet to come. I have to learn exactly what is going on so that I can manage it better going forward. That way I can focus on what I need to do to keep my sanity.