Mornings Are Hard

Good Morning, Folks. This is going to be one of my rare unsyndicated posts, where I just talk to the folks who read me every day. This is Tuesday of the down week between my second and third rounds of chemotherapy, and I am well into the recovery mode. Yesterday I had my first round of iron infusions, and that seems to have helped quite a bit in general. When I finished with the infusion, it legitimately felt like I was waking up, and I had way more energy than I have had since I started chemo. This morning, unfortunately, things were back to being really rough, and I think mornings are just going to be that way as I recover. I had a lot of issues with nausea and indigestion last night, and as a result, I did not sleep terribly well, so it is hard for me to subtract what I am struggling with because of lack of sleep and what is struggle due to the treatments. Last round, I did not really start to feel like myself again until Friday of the down week, so I am curious if that happens again. The thing that worries me the most is that the doctors have talked about how Folfox is additive in the severity of the symptoms with the number of rounds that you have. The first round was honestly a cakewalk, apart from the whole blood pressure issues that I was dealing with. This round… the challenges have all increased from more days with nausea, to the whole weird-assed cold reaction lasting longer, to feeling like I just have no stamina when it comes to doing anything. I am trying my best to continue to function, and I am hoping I have a few good days at the end of the week to get some stuff done around the house. For the moment, doing my job and making sure both myself and the cats are fed is pretty much the maximum load that I can seemingly handle. Even playing games feels way more taxing than it should, and I have spent more time just catching up on shows than pretty much anything else. I am not complaining as a call for help, because I have plenty of resources that I can draw upon. I am just a deeply stubborn human being and really would prefer to do things on my own if at all possible. However, as we roll into round three, I am starting to doubt if that is going to be possible, especially if there is a continued escalation of symptoms, and I have six more rounds of this to go. I am going in for lab work on Friday, and I am really curious to see if the iron infusion has made any sort of lasting change to how low my red blood cell count was. I would post a picture of what the infusion looks like, but it is a wee bit too close to blood, and I do not want to make anyone squeamish. It was really weird because it sort of felt like I was bleeding in the wrong direction while taking it. I still have way more color than I did before yesterday, thanks to the infusion, but I think the burst of energy that I had immediately following it was all too temporary. All I really want now is a nap, so I might take one over my lunch break. I wish sleep came easier, but there always seems to be something getting in the way, and my old trick of Benadryl and Magnesium Glycinate does not seem to actually be working. One of the things that I swore when I started this process is that I would be honest with my readers about how it is going. This morning’s blog post is mostly just explaining where we are at. I am doing okay, I will be just fine, I will make my way through this… but it is going to be a much larger challenge than I originally thought it was going to be. The post Mornings Are Hard appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.