Chemo brain

During this cycle, I have become increasingly aware of the fragility of my mental and emotional resources. Don’t panic- I’m not having a breakdown or anything so dramatic; rather, I am more conscious of heightened sensitivity and a slightly askew intellectual capacity. There have been a couple of times in the last week when I have burst into wholly unnecessary and poorly timed tears, a few others when I’ve been suddenly awash with a rage that would lift the hair on the back of my neck, if I had any, and still others when I’ve been so overwhelmed by the bizarreness of this whole situation that I’ve stopped still in my tracks to look around and try to fathom out which angry sky god I’ve especially ticked off this time, and how to get back into his good books. (There have been a few other inexplicable mood shifts towards feelings that are- I’m assuming- linked to the plethora of hormones that are trickling through my veins, and which describing would constitute a highly inappropriate over-share. I shall not detail these,  as my mother is reading this. I often think that this blog would be much more entertaining for all of us if she weren’t.)

As wild as these moods swings are, they are on level par with my cognitive meltdown. I have lost whole threads of thought so badly that the children have to help me pick up the breadcrumb trail leading back to where I was headed, sometimes unsuccessfully. Emails that would previously have taken ten minutes to pen have left me crippled in front of the screen for half an hour and more. The day before yesterday, I spent nearly twenty minutes with a mother talking in animated tones about her son, only to realise that she wasn’t who I thought she was, that I’d never actually taught her boy, and that if I said another word about him, I would reveal that I am a complete moron. I quickly asked her then about her plans for Chuseok, which seems an acceptable diversion in situations like these.

I confess here that it has taken me three attempts to spell ‘acceptable’.

In addition to my de-railed trains of thought and general idiocy, I find that I have lost control of verbal structure and syntax. My grammar is all over the shop, and I genuinely fear that if the children use me as a linguistic model, they will all end up driving buses for a living. Not that there’s anything wrong with that- I’d quite like a few bus drivers to be as lovely as my students, given how crabby they generally are when my T-money card doesn’t register. However, I understand that their parents are far more aspirational. This grammatical failure is accompanied by a chronic constriction to my vocabulary, though. I have fewer words, and the ones I have are assembled poorly.

Evidence? Yesterday:
I was in the ESoL office, chatting to a colleague about our plans to take our classes to the UK for Spring Break, and we got on to the topic of descent. I was, as many pseudo-neo-quasi Brits are, a little blase (put an accent over that ‘e’; I’m jiggered if I can figure out how) about the tendency for people to invest energy into seeking out long lost relatives in the British Isles. I was about to pass comment on some of the (completely impossible) family history that gets turned up, and some of the connections that people therefore believe they have.

Colleague: So your family has had some dubious claims made?
P- Well, my mother once read something written online by an amateur-...

And here I stopped dead in the sentence. I knew that the word that I wanted to use next was not the word I should be using. I knew that it was completely, unforgivably, chronically incorrect. And yet it was the only word I could think of. The right word was somewhere behind it, but I couldn’t see it, and I knew that if I used the word I wanted to use, I would never, ever, ever hear the end of it.

Because even through the fog, I knew that calling someone an ‘amateur gynecologist’ is  very different from calling them an ‘amateur genealogist’.

Oh, so different.

So, after the cascade of giggles finally subsided, I determined that I needed a few mantras to be distributed amongst my friends and colleagues to help me through these months when I am likely to speak inappropriately, to behave over-emotionally or irrationally, and to help me tell when I am really close to lines that could get me sacked or deported or worse. There is an open season on these statements. Everyone is allowed to use any of them on me at any time deemed necessary, in any order or priority you like. No recriminations, no argument, no hard feelings. They are as follows:

Do nothing stupid. (And there are whole hours when I chant this one)

That might not mean what you think it means. (For the remarks that cause me to dissolve into tears, but are actually more well-meaning/intended than I hear them)

Are you wearing your chemo glasses? (Because the world looks different through them)

You are looking for a different word. (You might even want to suggest the right one)

External moronologue, Patricia.

Have at ‘em. Save me from myself.

And let me point out before I close, that if as many people helped carry Nelson below decks following his getting shot at the Battle of Trafalgar as claimed to their grandchildren, it would have been like crowd surfing at Glastonbury.