BEFORE CHEMO:That is me on the right at 70kgs in late 2009.
AFTER CHEMO: weighing 80kgs in March 2011 - 10kgs overweight with a fat gut! I have some work ahead of me to get rid of that 'food baby'...
Now I know that everyone reacts differently to chemotherapy, so my experiences will not necessarily be the same as the next person's. However, I would have been interested in reading this before I started so I might as well share it with the world.
Nausea - the literature talks a lot about nausea so I was expecting this one. Of course, they always tell you that you will be taking anti-nausea medication to manage it and that is true. My experience was that the only thing that worked was Zofran. And here is a tip my Oncologist Dr Paul Mainwaring told me: Take the Zofran half an hour before you take the Temodal. It seems obvious in hindsight, but at first I did not know what I was doing, so I just lined up all my tablets and took them all at once! - Not good!!!
The other thing I discovered about the nausea was that, for me at least, I found that the nausea was always at its worst when I had an empty stomach. As a consequence I started snacking a lot of the time to keep the nausea at bay.
Tiredness - The literature talks about this side effect as well. But I was not prepared for the absolutely overwhelming tiredness that I experienced. I have been pretty active in the past but I found that it took an enoumous amount of mental discipline to get myself out there doing things during chemotherapy. Fortunately, my mates rallied around and made sure that I was still doing the odd bush walk and bike ride with them.
Weight Gain - Now this is something that I certainly was not expecting! The effects of the snacking associated with the nausea being worse on an empty stomach plus the tiredness (both described above) resulted in consuming way too much food for what I was burning off in exercise. The photos before and after Chemo show the result: a 10 kg weight gain in 12 months.
No blood problems - Strangely enough, the side effect most commonly described in the literature did not occur once for me in the 12 cycles I undertook. Every month I had a blood test and every month Dr Mainwaring would tell me that the 'bloods' (i.e. the results) were great! By the end I was hoping that there would be bad result so I could have some time off. Alas, that was not to be...
