Minimizing the effects of cancer treatment

Okay. Today I want to get into cancer and treatments and what you can expect and hopefully how to avoid it. Depending on where and what type of cancer you have, your symptoms may vary. Since I only have experience with brain tumors I won’t be able to tell you all the side effects involved with your particular kind of cancer. Fortunately the effects of chemo/radiation therapy are universal so I will still be able to help you out with that. I will start by addressing what cancer can and cannot take from you and then I will go into some tips about how to null the side effects of chemo and radiation.

What cancer and its treatments can and cannot take from your mind and body:

I’m sure you have heard all the terrifying rumors right now regarding chemotherapy and radiation. You will lose your hair, you will throw up everyday, food tastes like metal... Before you start worrying about that you need to take into account two things. 1: different people react differently to the treatments. I know a woman who actually gained weight while on chemotherapy to treat her breast cancer. You never know. 2: Remember what I said in an earlier posting about staying in the present. When you start dreading the treatments thinking “Oh God, how am I going to live through this,” it is going to be that much harder for you to get through it. It is really hard to maintain a positive attitude through these awful experiences but I can’t begin to relate how much easier they will be if you are in a good mood. Make friends with your doctors and nurses. Tell jokes. Make your nurses and doctors laugh. Stay as upbeat as possible.

As horrible and humiliating as chemotherapy and radiation can be, try to keep in mind that these treatments are saving your life. Every time you receive and injection of chemotherapy or get zapped by the radiation machine I want you to visualize the treatment fulfilling its goal. When the chemotherapy is streaming into your IV I want you to imagine the chemicals flowing through your bloodstream to the location of your cancer and attacking it. I want you to imagine the chemicals surrounding the cancer and just eating through it until there is nothing left. For every radiation treatment you receive I want you to imagine the radiation burning through your cancer until it is reduced to ash. By going through this visualization sequence during your treatments you are altering your thought processes to view the treatments as more positive experiences. This way, in your mind, instead of thinking that the treatments just making you sick, you now can think of the treatments as battling the cancer that is making you sick.

So you have made it through surgery and it is time for your first treatments. First of all congratulations for making it this far. I know the journey was not easy. Radiation, depending on where they are administering it can be devastating or completely unnoticeable other than a little less energy than you would normally have. Also keep in mind that different people react differently to the treatment. I had radiation to the head and spine so I got the worst of it. After the first treatment I started vomiting like crazy. After three weeks I had lost forty pounds. I’m not going to go into great detail about my wonderful six weeks of radiation therapy followed by my fifty-four weeks of chemotherapy but here are some tips and some of the odd effects that I experienced.

What the treatment can do to your body:

Again I want you to understand that the results I list are from personal experience and may or may not be an issue for you. I am writing this so you can be prepared for any eventuality.

• Hair loss
• Head hair
• Eyebrow/eyelashes/facial hair
• Chest hair, armpit hair, pubic hair and leg hair

• Nausea
• For me nausea was a big problem. I threw up two or three times a day for two years. After radiation some of my favorite food tasted terrible to me. I was hardly ever hungry and when I forced myself to eat I would throw up. The only food that I could eat and not throw up were (strangely enough): Cheese popcorn, olives with pimentos and on occasion Ritz crackers. After radiation stopped I immediately lost my craving for cheese popcorn but it was still something that I could eat without throwing up.
• Chemotherapy really messed with my taste buds. Everything tasted like I was eating metal (kind of like when you cut your mouth and you taste your own blood). I lost forty pounds during/after the radiation treatment and had to get a feeding tube. Feeding tubes are terrible. Do anything you can to avoid one. If you do get stuck with a feeding tube I advise you to make sure of a couple of things before it is inserted in your nose. First: make sure they grease it up real well. Second: I always thought it was less painful to insert when the end of the feeding tube is ice cold or even frozen when they shove it up your nose.

It is really difficult to remain healthy when you can’t eat. This means that what you do eat is very important. The healthiest things you can eat are vegetables. They are very alkaline and they provide lots of vitamins and minerals necessary for your body to repair itself from the chemotherapy ravaging it. I don’t know about you but I really don’t care for vegetables and even looking at them when I was being treated made me sick. The solution here is juicing. Get a juicer and start making smoothies. Later I will post a recipe for my favorite vegetable smoothie. I encourage you to be creative though. Cook up your own recipes that taste good to you. Also, I encourage you to use organic vegetables/fruit for the juicing.

• Skin problems
• Radiation burns the skin. This is like a sunburn times ten. Depending on the intensity of the radiation, the top layers of your skin can start to peel off (mine did). It is very important that you revitalize the places where your skin was treated after every treatment. I used Aloe Vera and vitamin E oil. Directly after (I want to stress the word after because if you do it before the oil will magnify the radiation and do even more damage to the skin) the treatment apply a little bit of aloe vera and vitamin E to the treatment areas. That night, repeat this process. Make sure that all of the oil is completely absorbed into your skin before your next treatment.

• Physical and mental fatigue
• This is a tough one. The radiation and chemotherapy treatments create a lot of physical and mental fatigue and there isn’t much you can do about it. If you are in good enough shape to take supplements in addition to everything else you already have to take there are a few things that help a little bit. Acetyl-L-carnitine and alpha-lipoic acid helped me a little bit for the mental fatigue. These are supplements that you can purchase at just about any health food store. Also green tea and just about anything with ginseng in it help to raise energy levels in most people. Other than that though all I can really recommend is exercising as much as you possible can. Whether it is walking for a couple of miles or walking up the driveway, everything helps. I got so frustrated from the fatigue at one point in my chemotherapy I got on my bike and rode around the block (the doctors still don’t believe me). Do as many things for yourself as you can. Believe me, I know it is hard but everything you do for yourself now is something you don’t have to fight to gain back later.

There are a lot of other little side effects too numerous to mention that I really don’t have any advice on so I have left them unsaid. There is no point in me planting apprehension in your head for no good reason. I want you to again keep in mind that some of the symptoms that I have described may not affect you. If you have any questions about symptoms that I have not addressed here please email me at maxletizi.blog@gmail.com and I will do my best to help you out if I can.

You have been thrown into a situation where you’ve been forced to fight for your life. In this mortal struggle against cancer you are fighting for your right to live. Make no mistake you are fighting a life and death battle. You were taken from your normal, everyday routine and plunged into a full fledged war and you are retaliating. You are all heros. The doctors can provide a lot of help along the way but it is you who ultimately has to carry yourself to victory. I love you all and wish you the best of luck.