Too Much Information

When I was 19 I travelled from Montreal to Oslo by freighter.  My father had travelled from Canada to England during WWII and had his own sailing and sea-sickness story, the moral of which was that you’ll fare much better if you keep food in your stomach.  So between his advice to eat something and head for the deck where I could focus on the horizon when I started feeling queasy, plus the cabin steward’s insistence that I never miss a meal, I pretty much ate my way across the Atlantic.  And never once did I get truly sick, although my cabin mates did suffer somewhat.  We were lucky as it wasn’t a particularly rough crossing, even though we did, for 3 days, have to have the table and chairs anchored down and the ‘fence’ installed on the table to prevent our plates and cutlery from sliding into our neighbour’s lap.

Years of dealing with food allergies that hit me in the GI tract have taught me that when I’m battling nausea I need to eat.  Getting food into my stomach does one of two things.  A – it settles my stomach so that the nausea is bearable.  B – It gives me something to heave if that is necessary.

When the doctor in the ER told me that the reason chemo patients are having nausea is because the chemical cocktail attacks the lining of the stomach, that just meant to me that I was going to have to eat my way through this, too.

I’m truly lucky to be going through this, now.  Advances in treatment of cancer mean that the chemical cocktails have gotten very specific.  I’m also fortunate in that I’m not getting the most aggressive form of the cocktail.  There were two patients in the clinic last time that need to wear cold ‘mitts’ during their treatment so that they don’t lose their fingernails.  🙁

I’m also very lucky in that anti-nausea meds are well known and freely given.  The clinic staff have been empathetic and supportive, concerned with making this process as painless as possible – given that we are essentially poisoning the host to kill off the rogue cells.

As for my hair, every day I lose a few more but so far there has been no critical loss.  One of the sites I referred to about the chemical cocktail I’m taking said that I may only experience ‘thinning’.  I’ll bring the wig with me to Quebec, just in case the loss goes critical while I’m away.  🙂

I’m over the worst of the 2nd treatment now.  It takes about a week for the process to work it’s way through.  Partly it’s the sterioids, too – I’m finding it almost impossible to sleep during the 5 days of treatment with those and that lack of sleep leaves me reeling from exhaustion.  But once that clears up I start feeling better.

One of my concerns is that this whole process is going to get prolonged because my white cell count doesn’t recover quickly enough.  So I talked to a friend who has done a lot of investigating into nutrition and helped family through the chemo process about what I can do to help and she gave me some feedback on what I can do.  More eating.  Heck, I can do that!