IT is impossible to stay positive all the time.

This is my third and final day of treatment this week. In fact, all I do today is go in to have the pump taken off. I come home Monday and Tuesday nights with a pump that runs for 22 hours each day and night. That is not counting the 3 hour IV infusion I get at the center Monday and Tuesday Morning. This is my 5th treatment and the side effects have gotten worse since the first one. This is normal I am told.

My side effects are debilitating to say the least. nausea, profound fatigue, extreme pain in my neck glands when I take the first bite of anything, extreme numbness and neuropathy in my hands and feet, and an absolute in ability to eat or drink any cold (it feels like razor blades in my mouth. When I grasp or touch any thing that is not room temperature or higher, it feels like I am touching a frosty, medal pole, or when I walk on a cold floor, it feels like I am walking bare footed in frosty grass.

These side effect take about 7 days to dissipate. It is not fun. Perhaps the worst side effect of Chemo is the fact that my outlook and sense of hope diminishes with the tiredness. The depressive illness that I have had for years, takes control, and I feel generally less hopeful than at other times. Seeing all the Christmas decorations and watching all of the commercials on TV don’t help either. And so, I feel depressed and a little low on hope and faith.

I honestly don’t know what the outcome of all of this is going to be. There is a good change I will survive the entire ordeal. There is a chance I will not. When ever I seek more information from the medical community, I get blank walls and noncommittal answers and I suppose this is normal. They always say that we will know more after my six months of treatment. Waiting that long, I find difficult.

I like to believe that I am strong, and that I will handle all of this with all of the class and spiritual strength I have. But the truth is, like right now, I don’t feel strong and I don’t feel like every thing is going to be fine as much I have before. I suppose this is normal. When I am sick from treatments, It all gets worse.

These are the times I hear the stories of my fellow patients who are not going to make it louder than I hear the stories of those who have survived. While I still feel as if I will accept any final outcome as best I can, meaning with as much dignity as I have in my being, I am no stoic or noble man marching off to war with no fear of dying. I want to live, and it wares me down the most; more than all of the chemo, more than anything else is the fact that I will not know the effectiveness of the treatment for another three to four months. If I were living in a sealed box such that nobody knew if I were already dead or still alive, I would be in neither state, like Schrödinger’s Cat. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm7fLpoh-9w

I suppose, I was not ready to be facing such issues at my age, but then again, who would be? I am no different than any body else; we all know our ultimate fate and still go on functioning normally. At times, in fact, most of the time, I have a hard time functioning at peak performance knowing that my life may be cut short, and despite all of my brave and uplifting entries in this journal, I am often very frightened.