on getting by without short-term memory

I remember having a memory. It was nice, having a memory. Maybe one day I’ll have a memory again.

So I'm back on the Temodar this week, and almost immediately the short-term memory loss associated with this particular drug made itself apparent. The trick with chemo, I’ve discovered, is to load yourself up with enough chemical supplements to survive the week. This sounds a bit like the hair of the dog, and I’m sure it is. But this is the mystery of chemotherapy, about which I have already have excruciating doubts. And the chemical overload seems to be all that works. Every day I need to take anti-nausea meds for the queasiness; milk of magnesia for the constipation; a steroid to counteract the swelling caused by the chemo which, if functioning correctly, will bring your entire motor system to a grinding, lurching halt. And that means no walking, no writing or typing; you’ll be lucky if you can maneuver your fork to your mouth to feed yourself, if in fact you remember that that hollow sensation in your stomach means you're hungry.

But the chemicals are necessary—so they say--if I want to continue doing my job, getting paid, and having anything like a life worth living. Chemotherapy alone means living in a walking dream-state—a dream-state so vivid that sometimes you have difficulty separating dreams from reality. I spend entire days believing I’ve had all sorts of conversations I haven’t had and thinking that I’ve accomplished tasks I haven’t started. This is always so disappointing. And when I’m not believing fantasies, I’m just asleep--for up to eighteen hours a day.

All of this makes me question the effectiveness of chemo, especially insofar as it will take three weeks or more for these side-effects to wear down after my current batch of pills is exhausted (they give your body these little breaks to recover), at which point of course it’s time for me to take even more chemo.

We all know that chemotherapy itself can cause cancer. The theory is that it’s supposed to attack fast-growing cells, which is what tumors are. But I worry. If the chemo were working effectively to destroy my tumor, it it seems like it should be killing off what was left of my hair and fingernail cells as well, and yet my hair and nails are still there. Well, not the hair is not entirely there—the stuff burned off by the radiation is still gone. But I’ve lost nothing because of the chemo alone, other than my balance, my sense of time, my ability to follow a recipe, and other certain brain functions I used to rely on with a certain degree of regularity. It makes you wonder.

There’s enough literature out there about Temodar for me to be willing to give it a fighting chance—especially in conjunction with my flax-seed oil diet, which I’m secretly convinced is doing all the real work in this strategy game. Temodar is a new kind of chemotherapy drug that has proven especially effective in reducing glioblastomas. They (meaning, of course, some people I don’t know whose opinion on these things count much more highly than mine) have high hopes for it, and so do I, since I have nothing better to do than hope for the best. But that doesn’t change the fact that when I’m on my week of Temodar, my memory ceases to function and that I no longer have a functioning concept of time, of when things are due, of how to organize tasks so that I can get those things in on time, and the like. Even remembering the day of the week is just enormously difficult. I have to look that up a dozen times a day.

I have developed tricks for dealing with my handicaps, however. Yesterday, for example, I decided I wanted to make a cake for strawberry shortcakes, one of my favorite desserts and one of the easiest to justify as being entirely good for you instead of, well, carcinogenic, as everything else seems to be. (All berries are neatly anti-cancerous. Toss them with a little splenda, instead of the usual canciferous sugar, and you’re good to go—at least so far, until the headlines shout out what we have come to expect from most of our chemical-food breakthroughs about miracle products that taste as good as sugar but have none of the negative nutritional qualities. That will happen eventually, no doubt, but until then we still have strawberry shortcake, and as of yet I see no reason not to make it whenever I get the chance.)

Except the whole process is just a little different when you’re undergoing the chemo.

So the first thing I had to do when I determined what I wanted (which is in itself frequently a several-day process), was write down in my little notebook that I wanted to have some strawberry shortcake. Yep, I even have to write down things I really want, because otherwise I will forget that I want them. After that I have to devise a plan for how to get what I want. Yesterday I began my process by taking out a bowl and putting it on the counter. Then I took out all the ingredients, and I measured out the flour and the soda and the salt, and then I greased the pan. I left all of that out on the counter, so that I would remember it.

And then that was altogether too much and I was exhausted, so I took a nap.

Half an hour later, when I was done napping, I woke up, noticed the ingredients lying around, consulted my little notebook to remind myself what it was I had set out to do, and continued on my task. I preheated the oven and mixed the dry and the wet ingredients and poured them into a pan, and I put the pan in the oven to bake. And while the cake was baking I took another nap.

Tell you what, though—it was still worth it.