Introduction with a good dose of whining

Me, looking a little pale, and my cap at
February chemo sesh

For two weeks, I was obsessed with my hair. Specifically, whether it would stay on my head. My first chemotherapy infusion was on Jan. 29, during which, for seven hours straight, I wore crylon-gel-filled caps, chilled on dry ice to -27 degrees Fahrenheit. The caps are supposed to put hair follicles to sleep and prevent them from absorbing chemotherapy drugs. Is it painful? Only for the first five minutes per cap (you switch them every 30 minutes). And, yeah, I ended up with a bit of frost bite on my scalp and ear. But for the type of chemo I'm receiving—Taxotere and Cytoxan—there's reportedly a 90-percent success rate with the caps. Two weeks after the first chemo, I started shedding like a cat in Texas in July; but we have 100,000 pieces of hair on our heads, and I think I've lost only about one-quarter of that, maybe one-third. At first, I tried to scoop up all the stray hairs to get some sense of the loss rate, but ended up just tossing the hairs in the trash.

But now hair loss seems silly. Chemotherapy's supposed to shut down a woman's ovaries and temporarily (for some, permanently) put an end to periods. They call it chemopause.  For hormone-sensitive cancers like mine, that's supposed to be a good thing. But my ovaries instead appear to be pissed off. I've had heavy bleeding before; last year, I needed a blood transfusion. And it looks like I'm heading in that direction again. My red-blood-cell and hemoglobin counts have plummeted since Friday. I can't walk five steps without getting out of breath. I can feel my heart struggling to pump blood. It's scary. And it all makes me very angry. Having needles stuck in my arm is at the top of my list of things to avoid—but, whatever; I deal with it. Feeling awful, missing work and generally being useless is what's bothering me. I'm a reporter / editor at a small alt-weekly and I put a lot of pressure on myself to do well. But, since I was diagnosed with breast cancer in early August, my work product's declined. The diagnosis was followed by a bilateral (double) mastectomy in September, then two rounds of IVF (my husband and I didn't realize how much we wanted a kid until faced with the possibility of never having one), which ended up being more emotionally taxing than the breast cancer (more on that in a future blog). And, now chemo, the side-effects of which are best described as feeling like you're coming down with the flu while reading a book in a stuffy car after not getting any sleep for a couple days.

Why am I writing about this now? I didn't feel like it until recently. Even then, I stopped and started this first post for a few weeks. But now, missing another two days of work; thinking about the stories I haven't been able to write and the ones that turned out less-than-ideal because I was feeling ill / dealing with bad news / nervous about treatment; sitting here in bed in a messy bedroom (that's part of a messier house) and thinking about all I've missed in the last several months... the least I can do is get this first blog post up. I promise future posts will be less self-focused and self-pitying and instead aimed at helping other women who find themselves in a similar situation—pre-mastectomy shopping lists! alternatives to Compazine! how to give yourself an injection and not pass out! And, at some point, hopefully the blog will turn a corner and focus on things that have nothing to do with breast cancer.