Desperate cures; the last hurrah

There is a golden moment when you leave Chemotherapy knowing that it is your last treatment.  Friends suggest celebration and champagne, but I went to bed. The battle with the cancer villain felt like it was on ‘pause’ rather than finished.  It would be a month before tests would show if I still had cancer or not and even then I’ll always be on hold.

What has followed is a month of trying desperately to get back to normal.  Looking back it does seem absurd, but desperate people do desperate things.

I guess I had imagined that when chemo stopped I would feel elated and therefore, the cancer fairy would smile down on me and take me where I wanted to go.

Hoping to get my voice back to normal after almost a year of whispering I made an appointment -  two weeks after chemo ended – to see a specialist across the Atlantic.  It was a good idea … which I didn’t begin to have the strength to put into practice.  Never mind running before you can walk, first I needed to walk rather than hobble.

Then I thought, why not try acupuncture?  Hopefully, the magic needles would give me my energy back. But I kept thinking that lying for hours with needles stuck in me was not unlike chemotherapy: what was the matter with me? Did I miss it? The morning of the appointment, one week after the final chemo, I was too sick to go, so that took care of itself.

Maybe it’s best to begin with basics, I thought.  So I booked myself in to see my hairdresser.  Of course I only had a few hairs left, but vanity spoke and I was convinced I would feel better if the hairs were brunette rather then grey.  Also I was sure that if my hair was cut it would grow back better.   This, too, was a semi failure.  After three hours and three tries the color finally worked on my damaged hair.  I still had to wear a wig or scarf when I went out, but somehow I felt better. Is it vanity or an intense desire to look ‘normal’ again?  I did leave the salon feeling much better; I imagine that if women were bald they might still go to the hairdresser, just to get their skulls shined, and would leave feeling beautiful.

I just found the energy (as one does) to get make up done.  After six months mostly spent in bed, I thought I was looking ghostly.  I walked out having bought more make up than I would ever have the energy to put on.  I did get an amazing lipstick that doesn’t come off once it sets;  I managed to get a big smear on my neck and couldn’t get it off. Oil was supposed to work and I ran to the kitchen to get olive oil.  No luck. Oh well. My neck was red for a few days. No one mentioned it.  It is not noticed among the other changes.

Losing weight always helps, or so I thought, because it is the one thing you can control.  I tried no carbs, but after a week felt stranger than ever.  On to the low fat diets, and that didn’t even last a week … so much for control.

Then I got desperate and did something dangerous.  On the internet  I found the idea that anti depressants might cure the symptom of hand and foot tingling and burning.  So I found a psychiatrist who was willing to prescribe it for me.  I ended up with nausea and exhaustion. I went to bed for three days, lost my appetite and felt sicker then I had after the chemo,  so that is the end of that experiment.  The positive aspect was that I lost a few pounds and my appetite still hasn’t come back.

I’m not out of ideas yet and if you follow my blog at http://cancercurmudgen.com/ you will see what happened when I went to the health resort.  I can still try a host of alternative therapies, but my health insurance won’t cover them, which is a sobering thought.  For now, I return happily to my bed thinking that rest is the best cure – and it’s free.