One of the biggest obstacles that has been put in front of me by my treatment, is finding a balance between what I can and can't, physically and mentally do. Often, I will feel absolutely fine and wake up looking forward to the day ahead and yet by 1:30 I'll be completely exhausted. In particular, during my intensive phase of treatment, I'd have to return home after half a day of school just because I was so drained. It can be really challenging to know quite how much you should exert yourself and is unsurprisingly, very demoralising, as things that you'd take for granted before treatment, such as walking up a flight of stairs, can be an almost painful process! Learning to judge how much is physically possible is an important part of recovery but if done accurately, can be incredibly rewarding.
Anyway, this does have a relevance towards this week, as finding a balance is also very important in the amount of chemotherapy that I must take. Each person reacts differently to different levels of chemotherapy, some are very sensitive to it, while others need more to obtain the full effects. I am in the latter of the two groups and today, after my blood tests, I was told that my uptake of chemotherapy will be increased. Naturally, I was very upset because the tablets hardly make me feel great at the best of times, but there's next to nothing I can do, except hope that my blood levels start to come down again. Only in this way can the doctors know that the chemotherapy is working as it should. Over the course of treatment, you get little set backs but it's so so important that you don't let it get you down too much. My treatment has another two years left and over that time I'm sure that my blood levels will fluctuate and my chemotherapy will be tampered with many times. However, I know that after the last year of having all sorts of drugs pumped into me, really, taking some more tablets that'll make me feel rubbish for a few extra days a month are well worth making sure I recover fully.
Of course, I can write this now, but come tomorrow I am going to be as grumpy as all hell!
I'm really sorry to hear this has happened- my treatment was juggled a bit when my doctor's added in an extra chemo course and the least I can say is that it was quite crappy and so I get how down you must have felt! But yeh if you want to talk then we could use the google hangout thing once i've mastered how it works!
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