sucky meds

I'm on the home stretch now: this is my final week of chemo and radiation. On Wednesday the 6th--12th Night!--I complete my treatment. For now, anyway--apparently, according to the "standard of care" (I get quoted this a lot), you go off the radiation and chemo for a short period, then you get a double-blast of chemo for a week (oof, not really looking forward to that). And then you're done, barring any reassessing once they get a look at my next MRI.

This past week has been hardest of all, though. They say they have not increased the radiation, but the buildup must finally be hitting me. I tend to be tired and disoriented afterward. Sometimes I'll lose my entire afternoon to naps.

Still, there are moments of pretty good productivity. Morning's good until about noon; so far during this time I've gotten my courses planned; that's also when I can do a bit of writing, and that's when I get that cleaning bug I keep talking about. I love to clean when there's serious intellectual work to be done. I used to think this was an advanced procrastination technique, but now I think there's more to it than that.

And I also realized today that none of this sense of disorientation/disorganizedness is unusual, following a serious medical event or physical change of circumstances. When my daughter was born I kept a periodic journal, and, re-reading it, I find that I recorded many of the things I'm experiencing now: the sense of losing my routines, of wanting to write, but to write differently, and then, in order to do this thing, going back over old journals from past happy trips and editing them and rewriting them as a way of reliving those old memories and recovering my sense of who I once was. This must be a very normal process for me, and it's reassuring for me to know that this is apparently the way I've always organized my sense of self.

And there's only two more days after this. And then that's it--no more radiation. Once the radiation is through, I should also be done with the short-term memory loss, the disorientation, and all the other things that I've been noticing--all of which are typical side-effects of this kind of treatment plan. Radiation causes swelling in the brain, which may be what's contributing to the numbness in the right half of my body. So once it's over, I may get my sensation back, too.

Only two more days. I'm almost done.