The Best Laid Plans
I've put my chemo schedule in my planner in brightly colored markers.
Aaaaaand, I have to cross it out. Everything is being pushed back a week.
(Its nothing to be alarmed about - in fact, my oncologist giddily encouraged me to enjoy my week off.)
One of the things I've experienced about going through treatment is that there is so much going on, so many moving parts, so many procedures and appointments and medications that its like a complicated marble track where you are chugging along in one direction but a little switch appears out of nowhere that sends you off in a different direction.
Overall, I've been fortunate to enter cancer treatment (relatively) young, strong and otherwise healthy. My providers are proactive and efficient in treating. I've recovered well from surgery and I am tolerating the side effects of chemotherapy well.
The biggest challenge I have been facing is my darn sensitive skin. I would have said my skin was the furthest thing from sensitive when I was younger. But now I have reactions to just about any adhesive that touches my skin. I have experienced way more itchiness than pain throughout this process.
The day after my surgery, I was starting to feel itchy across the top of my chest along the collar bone. Although they used a dressing to cover my incisions and drains specific to sensitive skin, I was having a reaction to the tape used for the dressing during surgery itself. By the next morning, you could see a straight line of hives with a right angle traveling under my arms, exactly where the tape was placed during surgery. So I had to use Benadryl and cortisone cream.
When I had the procedure to place a port, I had a reaction to the dressing they used, which was the alternative usually used for adhesive allergies. Break out the cortisone cream and a few doses of Benadryl.
Every time I've had chemo when they have accessed the port, I have had a red shadow of the dressing that is only on my skin for a few hours. The incision stayed a little red but it looked okay to my providers.
Until today. My nurse doesn't remember it looking so "angry." They decide to draw my blood the old fashioned way and to page the PA who did the port implantation procedure. He came to see me in the oncology office and thought my skin was reacting to the stitches but wanted to put me on a course of antibiotics just in case.
My oncologist agreed and didn't want me to have antibiotics at the same time as chemo so told me we were rescheduling to next week. He assured me its very common to have a week break and it will help me to feel stronger as I continue with treatment. He encouraged me to enjoy the week, especially since I had experienced more annoying side effects over the past two weeks and I was still fighting off residual cold symptoms. "Everything you're telling me convinces me this is the right decision."
But my calendar!! My schedule!! I have started seeing clients and booked them on my "good weeks" and now my good weeks will be different! Even though there are advantages to the change in the schedule - no longer having chemo the day after Thanksgiving, for example - this pushes my end date closer to Christmas. And while I know I didn't do anything wrong and my body is just doing things the best it can, it is so easy to get that niggling feeling of not doing a good job as a patient.
My usual MO is to push through and recover later. This strategy has worked well in the past, but its not possible now. As frustrated and impatient to get through this as I am, as "good enough" for chemo as I feel, as normal and predictable as I want this time to be for myself, and also for Dave and the kids, as unbelievable as it seems to me I have to listen to the message to slow down even more, take even more care.
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