What I Wish I'd Known Before Beginning Chemotherapy
http://health.msn.com/health-topics/cancer/what-i-wish-id-known-before-beginning-chemotherapy
1. It's different for everybody.
Many cancer patients cited this as the most important thing they wanted others to know. "Don't listen to the horror stories!" counseled one colon cancer patient. "There's always someone telling you how sick or exhausted they were, but none of that happened to me, and I wish I hadn't been so scared."
Rule number one, then, is to take scare stories with a grain of salt, or at least a dash of skepticism. Some people do suffer terrible nausea, excruciating pain, or crushing fatigue. But there are just as many cancer patients who said they didn't experience these side effects, or who experience them only minimally. Still others said they experienced most of the "typical" symptoms but didn't find them as troubling as they expected. And of, course, there are some for whom the treatment is much more debilitating than they ever thought possible, and no one else's experience prepared them for that, either. Bottom line: It's different for everyone.
2. Emotional reactions are very personal—and by no means universal.
Even a symptom or side effect that's extremely common may be experienced very differently from one person to the next. "I'm a huge foodie -- I love to cook, I love to eat, and good food has always been a big part of my life," said one lung cancer patient. "So when chemotherapy made me lose my sense of taste, that was so traumatic for me; it made me feel like a different person." Others find the taste changes that come with cancer treatment a minor inconvenience.
There are ten total. I thought this may be a good reference for people facing chemo for the first time.
I remember getting the mouth sores. I lived on Ensure for weeks and have never been so miserable in my life. They are not supposed to get bigger than a dime. I had a couple of quarter sized ones.
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