After yesterday’s appointment with my gastroenterologist, I thought the subject of fatigue merited its own entry on this blog. If you’re going through cancer treatment, you’re going to feel it, but take it from me: there’s fatigue and there’s tiredness, and together they make a nasty Mobius loop from which (it seems) there is no escape.
‘Tired’ is something you can fix. It is temporary, and a couple eight-hour nights of sleep back to back will set everything to rights. Fatigue, by contrast, is not so easily conquered. It’s a constant feeling that sinks in and hangs on until your body has purged the thing that’s causing it: the chemo drugs. Earlier this week, I was told it will take several additional weeks or even months for those drugs to clear my system.
Several of the medications I take for chemo-related side effects also cause fatigue or fatigue-adjacent symptoms, such as sleepiness, sleeplessness, or dizziness. I know the steroids I take during and just after an infusion mess with my sleep cycle, but the effect is starting to hang on. I haven’t slept through the night, for seven or eight uninterrupted hours, for about a month and a half.
Dehydration also causes a sluggish, droopy feeling that some people describe as ‘tiredness’ and others call ‘fatigue.’ Drinking more water doesn’t always banish it entirely, either. If someone is getting dehydrated from constant diarrhea, they are also losing electrolytes and key nutrients such as potassium. Fatigue won’t really start resolving until or unless those levels are restored to normal.
I also have to be perfectly frank about my emotional/psychological state: I feel drained in every possible sense of the word. I have been sick and/or in treatment for what turned out to be cancer for almost a full calendar year. That means I sometimes struggle to remember what ‘normal’ looks and feels like. Then, when I can visualize how things used to be, the memory is so painful I can’t bear it – because I have no idea what the new ‘normal’ will be. A small part of me is terrified that what I’m experiencing now is the new status quo, this constant lack of stamina and energy. Thoughts like that keep me awake even when everything else is copacetic.
Tomorrow morning, I have my usual appointment for pre-treatment blood work. I’m going to ask for fluids and yet another prescription of some sort to help me sleep soundly. I don’t want to take any more medication, but I can’t go on like this and hope to be functional. I have one more infusion to endure, one more slog through the valley. I can only surmise that a greater, deeper sense of fatigue will be part of it, and I don’t see how I will get through it and stay strong if I can’t get the respite of sleep.
medicinal sausage 