The last six months have been a challenge at best. I've been diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma cancer and undergoing to subsequent treatments. For me, being diagnosed as stage 3B, it has only involved chemotherapy and not radiation thankfully. Now I have arrived at the final countdown, so to speak, as my last treatment is on Friday the 1st of March. Some pretty rough things have happened to me durring this process, some of which are my own fault and others beyond my control. So I'll go ahead and run down the list as a measure of self therapy and processing.
Fear, don't let the exterior fool you, I don't care how much you know or how confident you are. When you get diagnosed with cancer you feel fear, the fear that you could die (reguardless of the remission statistics) and you have a fear of the treatments as you go over the possible side effects of the drugs that you will be treated with. Mentally processing the fact that you have cancer is a lot like dealing with the multiple stages of greif. I am apparently one of the few that moved to acceptance about the time I started my first treatment and decided not to be a victim of this disease any more than I had to be.
Drug dependancy, not addiciton, was the first side effect. I couldn't seem to make it for a single day without anti-nausea meds for the first several treatments and the meds have changed over time as the previous perscriptions became ineffective.
Muscle atrophy and or degeneration. I had to use a cane about a month in due to muscular issues in my legs to the point where I almost couldn't stand on my own without it and walking would have been totaly impossible. I have since recovered or adjusted to this and am now cane free and almost totally mobile in the normal sense.
Stagnation, it's hard to do things and feel useful when you are sick all of the time. You can't go to work because of the side effects of the chemo and you lose confidence that you will be able to make it through a day without getting sick on some level and becoming unable to continue. After several weeks of this I became very unmotivated and withdrawn from everything in my life as I could not participate fully and felt that I was not only letting myself down, but others as well. Due to the amount of time I missed because of all of the other side effects this has also made work very difficult but so far I still have a job and am back to 40 a week most weeks.
Seperation, no this isn't a direct side effect of the treatments or condition but they certainly didn't help this. In a relationship where neither individual is perfect and both of us had let things get too far gone between us I was dismissed from the house in the begining of December, great timing.
Neuropathy has set in on my hands to the point of where my nails are yellow and gross looking and I have very little sensation in my fingertips. No one knows if this will ever go away.
Surgery, I had to have my appendix taken out on Feb 3rd which wasn't fun, two more weeks down to heal up from that. In addition, I became addicted to NORCO and Morphine (perscribed to be clear and cover my ass for work, still have the bottles). The withdrawls from that were horrible on a level I have never gone through before. I'm clean now and will not go swimming in those drugs again if at all possible.
Now as I'm hitting the end of the road, the final decision on my marriage has come down and we get to divide and divorce has been the verdict, that just rounds out the crapfest of the last six months with a gold star. I'm sure I'll post more on that in specifics, to an extent, once I can do so without anger and rage. For now it's day by day and where I go from here.
Friday will be the last treatment as I've stated, and I will be ringing the bell in the cancer treatment area signifying that I am done with my treatments and now cancer free! I'm excited about that because, as I see it, I will be ending all of the bad garbage in my life and getting things back on track.
More eventually if my blogging history is any indication.
