Keep Moving!

Twice a week I drive up to the hospital and head down to the gymnasium in the bowels of the building.  Usually when I arrive, the previous exercise group is just finishing up but I can always tell who is in my group: the other group has babies and bags under their eyes, my group has headscarves and wrinkles.  It really doesn't seem so long ago that I was in the antenatal group myself...

My group are a jolly bunch, all things considered.  Sometimes someone has to sit down for a bit because they feel dizzy and none of us exactly drip with sweat due to exertion but we all have a go and a bit of a giggle at the same time.  Not bad when most of us are doing chemo, some have metastasised breast cancer, one has ovarian cancer, all of us have been under the knife.

We do the machines first and I always get frustrated because I have to go slowly or my heart rate flies up.  Apparently this is because of low red blood cells: the heart has to work harder to get enough oxygen around the body and so the physios circle round us reminding us again and again to breathe.  Then we do some work on the mats, the sort of small movements that look easy but cause agony by the time you've done it twenty times. Picture a hall full of women of a certain age wearing headscarves and attempting to exercise with strips of elastic and ankle weights...we must look hilarious.

And why does the hospital provide these sessions?  Because research has shown that physical exercise reduces the chances of the cancer returning.  Significantly.  In the old days they were always telling you to rest when you were on chemo, now the advice is to keep moving.  And it makes me feel better too: often I don't feel like going but I always have more energy afterwards.  Today my muscles still have the Taxol ache but at least they have a good reason to ache now! 

I have to confess that, before all this, I was getting a bit on the middle-aged flabby side.  Is it possible that I'll end up in better shape than I was before my diagnosis?  I can live in hope.

Weird Stuff on FEC

After a while, it gets difficult to know whether the weird things going on with my body are down to the chemotherapy or not.

The other morning, I got blearily out of bed and went to say good morning to the kids when I noticed them looking oddly at me.

“Mummy, you have blood round your mouth,” my daughter told me anxiously.  I rushed to a mirror and, sure enough, black blood was caked on my lips and my front teeth.  My mouth and tongue were, as usual at that point in the FEC cycle, pretty tender but there was no obvious cut or other source of the blood so I couldn’t work out where it had come from.  Unless, of course, the FEC causes vampiric tendencies and the blood on my lips wasn’t mine...

I cleaned it off and, to everyone’s great relief, it didn’t reappear.

Another unexpected side-effect is the way my heart rate zooms up when I get on the cardio-vascular machines during my exercise class.  I can be on the bike, legs happily pumping away and feeling that I can go faster, when the heart rate monitor will start flashing and beeping because my heart rate has hit 160.  My physio explained that this is because I have a low red blood cell count which makes it harder for my blood to carry oxygen around my system which, in turn, puts stress on my heart to beat faster.

“Respirez!” she yells at me at regular intervals, and so I have to concentrate on breathing heavily or I can’t get any speed up at all.

Which brings me to how incredibly cold I feel at the moment.  I’ve always been a bit hopeless with the cold but now I can be wearing multiple layers and still find myself shivering uncontrollably.  I’ve lost a few pounds, and so am a little less padded, but not that much.  I wonder if the low red blood cell count affects the body’s ability to stay warm as well.  Who knows?  Maybe I always shivered this much and just never noticed so much before.

Because it is, inevitably, difficult not to keep track of every headache, stomach grumble, achy limb and sore gums which might have happened before and just been forgotten but now is laid at the door of chemo.  I can just see myself, ten years from now, shivering in some bitter winter and saying, “I’ve never been able to stay warm since I had chemo...”

Let’s just hope that my husband sleeps soundly and doesn’t find teeth marks on his neck in the morning.