In twelve more days, it'll be my ten-month anniversary of undergoing my last chemo and radiation session and the word from my doctors is that there's no sign or indication of cancer. Which is a good thing but, man, the after-effects of the treatments are still with me, like, the neuropathy chemo gave me and made worse because I already had neuropathy on my right side and chemo made those sensations worse and the Lyrica I take every day only serves to take some of the edge off and I refuse to get back into taking powerful opiates because I got shit I need to be doing and I can't - and won't - do them while being stoned out of my mind.
I'm talking to the NP assigned by the outfit that my insurance deals with regarding my kidneys - which are still stable, by the way - and I'm trying to explain the neuropathy to her and while she's insisting that the main cause of peripheral neuropathy is diabetes... but with an A1C of 5.3, I'm not diabetic and I'm telling her that I got this shit on the right side because of the stroke I had way back in 2006 and got another dose of it via chemotherapy. I told her that neuropathy is one of the side-effects of one of the three drugs I was being treated with and while it's never a hard given that one can experience a side effect, I was hoping to avoid them and I did... except for the neuropathy and it's a motherfucker and a half to have both of my feet hurting/feeling numb/feeling cold when my feet aren't cold and, well, I just have to suck it up and hope that the chemo-induced neuropathy is going to eventually go away... but I have little faith that it will.
The dry mouth thing is making me fucking crazy. The recent CT scan of my head and neck reveal expected damage to my throat from the radiation treatments and, yeah, the dry mouth thing goes along with this and while it's been healing very damned slowly, you can imagine that it's not happening fast enough. At first, I had no sense of taste and there were only certain things I could taste which made trying to eat a problem because I couldn't taste it and my sense of smell was affected - those two things are a lot more connected than you might know or believe. At first, I couldn't taste anything salty but I could taste sweet; today, I can taste salt and some sweet stuff and my sense of smell is iffy.
Our new puppy took a major dump on his training pad not ten feet from where I was sitting and... I couldn't smell it. But that little fucker likes to lay under me and... farts and I mean the eye-watering, what crawled up his ass and died kind of farts. I've mentioned the taste/smell thing to my doctors, who just nod and say that, yeah, it's gonna be like that for a while but it'll get better... eventually. They tell me to sip water during the day to combat the dryness in my mouth and that works for as long as it take me to swallow the water; seconds later, my mouth is mad stupid dry and the OTC dry mouth items haven't been effective and it's been a bitch feeling like I have a loogie stuck in my throat and I can't get rid of it but sometimes, I can spit it out and... let's not talk about what it looks like, okay?
My immune system is still weakened but my lab work shows that it's slowly improving but my oncologist/hematologist doesn't seem to be all that worried about the values but says that the values are improving and... see you in six months.
So, that's all for now!
