With less than a month now til my last chemotherapy session I am getting frustratingly excited. So close but yet far enough.
What a journey it has been. I'll save the looking back and reminiscing about my experience for my next blog post.
No one tells you how mind-numbingly boring it is though going through chemotherapy. I don't know what I expected at the start, I expected to feel ill, as in really sick, most of the time. Which I haven't, well not as bad as I thought I would, which is weird.
Chemo makes me feel like my body has been taken over by chemicals that won't let me function normally - it doesn't let me relax and watch TV, it makes me anxious and on edge, I have no concentration so cannot watch a movie or read a book, I enjoy blogging but can only do that a limited part of the day, then what?
I know some people work partly throughout it but it totally depends on the course of chemo you are going through. Mine has made me lose my mind a little and I doubt I would be much use on a day to day basis working.
I don't want to sound like I am moaning, I guess I am trying to put into words what the past five months has been like, staring at the same four walls and feeling generally rubbish and unable to do much, I am bored. I am out of my mind, going stir crazy bored. I look forward to my boyfriend coming home each day and launch at him when he comes through the front door because it gives me someone to talk to and something to do.
Someone said, it must be great having all this time off, able to catch up on the latest box sets and movies but there is only so much TV you can watch. I dream of being back at work. There, I said it!
It is so hard to describe though the feeling of feeling this useless. On one hand I want to do lots but on the other the chemo makes you so tired and lazy that you are unable to do a lot. Contradiction in itself I know.
I have planned my holidays for the rest of the year, planned moving house and where I want to work already because I am itching to start my life again. I guess its natural, I have even decided to run the New York marathon in November 2012, well I say run, I am more likely to walk. Most of it.
This past month I have had stronger days and each month I seem to keep getting a bit more able to deal with it. When I first started my chemo back in October 2011, I was on an intensive treatment plan which knocked me down for two months, I could hardly leave the house, ended up hospitalised and generally felt like I was dying.
Now I am on a new regime of chemo which has given me two weeks out of the month to live 'normally', those two weeks I cherish, I fill my days seeing friends and doing as much as I can whilst resting as and when I need to. Getting cancer has certainly made me appreciate having a 'good' day, one where I can live normally. Leave the house, meet friends for lunch, get a bus!
I constantly feel though like I am not myself, I am missing my 'spark', I know I will get it back when chemo is finished and I start having a life again but because I am not living a normal life, its expected that I do lose part of 'me'.
In a month's time I will have had my last chemo session and will start to feel stronger. Once that is done, I have to go through two weeks of radiotherapy then, I hope, I am free to start my life all over again.
My hair is growing back and will keep growing which is nice. Although my hair used to be red which I love and its growing back brown! They said it could happen, it could grow back a different colour that is, within a year it should go back to normal. I HOPE.