Red pill, blue pill. 12 February.

 

Here is the red sheep, here is the blue sheep. Here is the bath sheep, and here is the bed sheep. But where is the green sheep?

Oh wait. Different book, different story. I meant to talk about pills not sheep.

The first cycle of chemotherapy hit pretty hard, as friends in the know predicted. Lots of sleeping, some nausea, a return to hospital after a temperature spike, and a brain that functioned in grooves or not very well. If I could hunt down a thought I could follow it through but sometimes lacked the energy to do a task I'd set for myself that day, then ran out of puff and did a lot more sleeping. 

The visit to hospital was good (I'm out now) and took pressure off the family, and I want to find ways to keep helping them as they help me. Sometimes that will mean occasional visits to stay at my dad, sometimes other things. Fiona has been wonderful and continues to be so.

What I'm currently finding entertaining and informative is the number of pills that I've been loaded up with for the treatment of various side-effects (tiredness, nausea, constipation, not-constipation, possible infection, inflammation, pain) on top of the full range of possible chemotherapy options and injections of unnamed substances.

It is very confusing, especially initially, because some of the treatments and subsequent treatments for side-effects have opposite effects and, in any case, require you to have at least a sense of what's going on.

Example, the steroids (to damp down inflammation) also can produce wakefulness and fast-paced thoughts, which can occasionally overcome the tiredness induced by chemotherapy. That's fine, and sometimes useful if you've been sleeping all day but suddenly get a burst of brain activity that allows you to work away for a few hours at night. The ideas flow freely, even manically and if it is for work-related writing that is good at the stage where you're drafting ideas. Then some sleep and as the steroid effect wears off, the brain slows down to a level where it is able to edit the incomprehensible brilliance you've produced into a form that a reasonable third party could begin to understand.

If you can understand that cancelling or opposing set of pill-effects as it relates to the thought processes, then you can use your imagination to extend the metaphor to other and lower bodily functions. The red pill is going to help you with side-effect X brought on by the painkillers. But before you had side effect X, you were suffering from symptom Y, which is actually the opposite of side effect X, so that's good right? Well sort of, except you weren't expecting side effect X, so you did what was advised and took the blue pill to help with symptom Y.

So you're sitting there, having been discharged from hospital, with the red pill and the blue pill. Each is potentially useful, even necessary. But they cancel each other out and you're not quite sure which one to take.

My solution just at the moment is to dump all the pills in one bag, and pick the one that I personally prefer at any given point, allowing for actual instructions and warnings about not taking too much. A lot of the time the actual instructions say something like 'take as needed and not if not'. So even though my approach sounds random, it fits within the best current medical advice available to me. Maybe it's a bit like with those night-and-day cold and flu tablets, where I figure that if you've got a very runny (non-COVID) nose, you just take one of each and the hype-up effects of one will be cancelled by the hype-down effects of the other.

This has turned into quite a long post, relative to the others. Looks like the brain-hyping steroid I took a few hours ago is doing its thing. Hyping leads to typing. Please respond in the comments therefore if you think this post needs a bit of subdued editing or at least the addition of subheadings. I find that if enough people comment, the advice cancels itself out and just like the pills, I can pick and choose out of what's there. So have at it!

"Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee." (Isaiah 26:3, KJV)