Hell week

Hell week usually describes a particularly hard week of training for Navy SEALs. Not that I have been doing anything more exhausting in the week after DHAP than moving from bed to sofa to toilet and back (often enough even barely able to master these distances) and instead of sleeping only four hours during the whole week I usually slept around 17 hours per day but still I feel like most of the top ten hell week phrases apply to my week after DHAP:

• Pain is good; extreme pain is extreme good
• You people are pissing me off
• Pain is weakness leaving your body (haha, really love that one!)
• Stop what you´re doing
• Say goodbye to the sun, gents
• (and five more very manly and not so fitting phrases ;))

Like I mentioned in my past posting the high-dose Cytarabine really knocked me out leaving me in a coma-like state until Wednesday. It is also a cytostatic used for brain tumor treatment and therefore able to pass the blood-brain barrier, f***ing with your brain and giving you depressive episodes. That means when I was not sleeping, I was either crying or really really really pissed off yelling at my Mom and my hubbie for just being there and obviously doing everything wrong. (How could they even THINK about opening the window shades to let the sunshine in? I mean, seriously they should know better. Right? ...Right?)

The three aggregate states of Anja during Hell week- sleeping, crying, angry (the sleeping baby has more hair than me, dammit!)

It´s really horrible when you´ve got no control over your thoughts and emotions and you´re helplessly tossed about by the biochemistry gone wrong in your brain. It´s like watching yourself from outside wondering "Who is that person and why the fuck is she so angry? And now sad. And now angry again. Whatthefff?". It doesn´t help that my doc confirmed that a lot of patients are having an emotional low after DHAP or to know that it´s just the side effects of chemo why you´re suddenly that (let´s be nice and call it) "person". Thank heavens for the apparently infinite patience of my Mom and husband otherwise they would have been running from me. I know I would have. As fast and far as I could.

This one goes out to my Mom and hubbie for being the angels they are

Trying to wear off DHAP without any casualties surely was hard. But hard enough to call it hell week? Mehhh, maybe not. But then there was also Neulasta. Never underestimate the side effects the Granulocyte-Colony Stimulating Factor (G-CSF) shots twice a day can have on your body. I know we´ve been there before but that was about one shot in like two weeks. Now we´re talking ´bout two shots daily for nine days in a row. Aww yeah, that´s a whole lotta bone pain and muscle aches and aching joints. Also my belly hurt after being used like a pincushion day after day.
Oh and the best thing? I couldn´t take any painkillers because my thrombocytes were around 20k only because not only DHAP but also Neulasta are destroying thrombos (having the side effect that I got to experience the so-called spontaneous bleeding after brushing my teeth for example). So I tried to breathe through the pain. Cause I read somewhere that that worked. Well, it doesn´t.

Breaaaathe in, I have no pain, breathe oooooout, pain is just conceptional, breaaathe in, ohmygod that hurts, breathe ooout, fuck where are my pills?

Hell week after DHAP- sleeping, Netflix, depression, pain, absolute weakness, bleeding gums and needles in the belly. Or in a nutshell: