The first week was pretty terrible, well, every week of chemo was awful, but obviously you're so shit scared at the beginning and you don't know what to expect that I think all the side effects are intensified. Add to this the fact that I was unbelievably healthy from the diet I was on and my body and soul were dead set against chemo, a truly winning combination. Well, here's the delightful little list of how Taxol affected me at the beginning:
- shooting pains all over my body, especially in my ovaries and breasts
- constant aching in my muscles and joints
- giddiness
- upset stomach
- tingling and numbess in my hands, feet and face
- tiredness
- dry skin
A curious thing happened, though. My lovely private/alternative oncologists recommended I put messages on the chemo packs (see the section on treatments and Water Messages, I put the word love) and that I visualize the chemo healing me and also that I repeat mantras to accept the drug while I was having the chemo session (I repeated chemo is love). I did this in the very next session (bless the nurses for going along with it) and the aches and pains disappeared. They just disappeared. Unbelievable. I had experienced something similar once before, in a workshop, run by a doctor, when we visualised our bodies filling with water. It's a fact that the brain and the nervous system cannot distinguish between what is real and what is not, so if we imagine something is happening to us, it is happening to us and we can produce the same real physical effects. Our body produces the water, and that day in the workshop the period pain I was experiencing simply ceased to exist as my ovaries were soothed by the water. It was also thanks to a couple of sessions of PSYCH-K that I changed my attitude towards chemo and the messages I was sending to the cells in my body.
From subsequent sessions I experienced the above (minus the aches) and the following:
- prolonged waves of exhaustion and big downers (in terms of hormones), bouts of crying and negativity, anger and hopelessness, all of which were drug-induced
- explosions of toxicity a day or so after the session, which I would notice from the metallic taste in my mouth, heavy aching ears, spots on my face - especially around the ears, how strange is that?
- radical changes in body temperature: boiling hot and freezing cold sweats which intensified during the course of treatment and which was the body's response to try and eliminate the toxins
- an upset stomach from time to time, a couple of bouts of diarrhea
- perpetual tingling and numbness and a general feeling of being ill
- a feeling of being disconnected from life, a total absence of vitality and at times with little or no will to live, because when you're at your worst life on chemo doesn't seem worth living
- in a nutshell, I felt drugged up to my eyeballs
I should have kept closer track of the symptoms, actually, because another way chemotherapy affects you is mentally - you can't remember anything (what you were going to say, what others have said, things you were meant to do, what you need to take with you when you leave the house etc), conversations or emails are hard-going because you can't find the simplest of words. One of the challenges of writing this blog, in fact, has been that I started writing it while all my mental and linguistic faculties upped and left. Two weeks after the final chemo session my brain came back from holiday, albeit jet-lagged, and now as I write four weeks after chemo the struggle for words isn't so severe. It's gone back to being just the normal struggle of a Brit who has lived in Spain for over twenty years and who can't speak real English anymore.
Side effects I didn't get:
Side effects I didn't get:
- no mouth sores! Thank god for small mercies and thanks to an Ayurvedic treatment called oil pulling (see the alternative treatments section).
- no thrush - thanks to something I was prescribed by my private oncologist
- no real lowering of the immune system - again thanks to what I was prescribed
Oh yes, and you loose your hair!
