"I Have Cancer? " Part 5

 

"I Have Cancer?" Part 5


Thank you all who have read my journal, and I apologize again for not keeping up with this. I just couldn't do it any more. Sad to say it is now March of 2011 and I have not entered anything since Set. 14th of last year. In fact I closed all 4 chapters so no one would read them and I still do not know why. The long and the short of this is that the depression got the better of me as the treatment got much worse then I ever imagined it would be.

I will try now to fill in the gaps as I recall them. There is one thing that happened through my treatment. I have memory loss at night. What that means is most days I have forgotten everything that happened the day before mostly the last half of the day. It is a side effect of the Chemo therapy which they did not tell me about. In fact there were a few things no one mentioned to me.

Perhaps it was for my own good to not tell me too much negative things about treatment. I can imagine that knowing it all might cause some people to refuse treatment out of fear and give up if they knew just how hard it can be. I myself had been lucky to say the least. I did not have to have a feeding tube inserted in my stomach as most do during the radiation treatment. The burns and sores in your mouth become so intense that you simply cannot even stand to sip water at times and to keep a persons weight up, a feeding tube is often inserted directly into the stomach or else the person would simply starve before they got cured or treatment ended. I simply forced myself no matter how much it hurt. The thought of a feeding tube to me meant that I was on my way out of this life and I just was not ready yet. I know it was an irrational assumption but it served its purpose for me and I didn't have to be force fed. Although the grief I caused was not good because of this. I worried my caretaker for weeks because it was rare that I would feel like eating. My weight slipped back down even further to the point that I lost over 40 pounds from the start.

Looking back I must say that 8-10 weeks of chemo and radiation were hell to say the least. There were days I was so weak that I could barely get out of bed to go to treatment. Then there were the hallucinations during the Chemo therapy that occurred. I would be sitting in the recliner being fed intravenously with the Erbutux and start talking wildly out of my head. Talking to people that were not there and saying things that you would not normally say in public. The worst part was I didn't even know what I was doing either.

As if that was bad, it was far worse in the pain department. They had risen my medication to the point of high doses of Methadone and Percocet. Methadone as you know is synthetic Heroin, and the withdraws off of it are severe. Just like withdrawals a junkie goes through. Soon I was to find out just how bad that was and in the next chapter I will discuss it.

The radiation as I mentioned in the last chapter had just begun and it was hard. First they had to construct a face mask I would wear during treatment to keep my head still. It looked like something out of a Hannibal Lector movie, and the all metal cage included a mouthpiece that clamped shut into my mouth, which by this time was sore enough because of having all my teeth pulled. There were days I was in tears and prayed the 15 minutes would go by quickly. I would even take extra pain meds as well as sleeping pills to try to overcome the pain. This went on for 8-9 weeks as far as I remember and thank God the Chemo stopped after about 6 weeks.

The weekends I did not have treatment and I was glad because it was all I could do to make it until Friday each week. The break was well needed.

Thank you S A Gibbins



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