7/8 - A Battle Won, Others Still to Come

Absorbing her final few drops of hydration fluid this evening, Kristine officially finished her final chemotherapy regiment. It's been almost five months since her first symptoms presented themselves on our ski vacation in Colorado. I think I speak for both of us when I say we feel completely turned around, not certain as to what exactly has just happened. While all time is warped by individual perception, the past five months for us know seems like an entire extra year went by and we barely blinked a second time.

The most difficult thing to grasp is that this is just the beginning. It's easy to get caught up in the victory and forget that the disease (although hopefully smaller and less harmful) is still there. This battle is complete, but there is no clear winner and still more battles to fight. The most imminent of which is surgical extraction. This is something that Kristine is having the hardest time dealing with emotionally. She has gone through so much in the past several months with little concrete affirmation of success. I read a great analogy that a cancer survivor had written on the topic of finishing chemotherapy. She said it's like a dog chasing a car and actually catching it, what now? To further complicate matters, Kristine's test results (CT scans and echocardiograms) show conflicting information. For Kristine (and all of us), this just creates greater uncertainty and anxiety for what's to come.

I've stood beside Kristine through this entire process and I can honestly say that I have only the faintest conception of what she has been through. After all, this isn't like a really bad cut that you can compare to a lesser one you recently had, simply projecting what it might have felt like if your cut had been 10 times as large and as painful. The emotional and physical distress independent to one another would be enough to send most of us over the edge, let alone having the two working together to compound their collective weight.

The short term physical effects of chemotherapy on Kristine are easy to report. There are some obvious, well known things such as her bald head and her significant weight loss (it's the lowest it has been since she was a teenager). But there are also the lesser known effects. Kristine has frequent hot and cold flashes and night sweats. Without eyelashes to prevent them from sticking together she has to stretch her whole face to open her eyelids. Her sense of smell has been enhanced which aggravates her nausea. She has seen a recurrence of fungus in her mouth (Thrush) causing swelling and soreness in her tongue. Her overall skin tone has yellowed and the folds of her knuckles and palms have taken on a dark brown tone. Her finger nails, like the inner ringlets of a split tree trunk, show white lines indicating the weeks of her treatment.

All of these physical manifestations are only temporary set backs and are likely to disappear in the next few weeks. The emotional struggle, however, will be something Kristine must endure until even well after any validation that the cancer is gone. The questions will continue to linger about whether the disease is truly gone or if it will come back.

For now, we are just thinking about getting Kristine through her nadir week. One day at a time.