Chemobrain: I've got it

A couple of books have recently come out announcing (surprise, surprise) that chemobrain actually exists. It's like false labor. Ever since Lucy roamed around East Africa, women have had false labor, but the medical establishment didn't believe in it until Drs. Braxton and Hicks studied the phenomenon and named it. I bet they were both men, too.

In any case, there's now been research on what some experts are calling "cancer- and/or cancer-therapy-associated cognitive change." (They would, wouldn't they.)

In one survey, primarily of breast cancer patients, at least 50% rated their symptoms as moderate to severe in the categories of
*lack of concentration
*short-term memory loss
*difficulty with word recall
*inability to organize daily tasks
That's not to mention the dyslexia, problems with interruptions, fogginess, and problems with follow-through of projects.

However, the experts assure us cheerily that most people regain at least some of their smarts after chemotherapy stops. For those of us whose cancer is a chronic condition that depends on indefinite chemotherapy, there's an image of brain cells running out like sand in a timer -- not a cheery thought.

I've been lucky. As far as I can tell, and please don't correct me if I'm wrong, I've only had two major cognitive changes from all my years of chemo. First, I have real word retrieval issues, and wouldn't you know, the problems always seem to happen when I'm telling a story to several people at once. I suddenly lose a key word. I grope madly for it, while the listeners wait patiently for me to be profound, or witty, or even coherent. I finally grab at something, anything, to finish the sentence. The word is usually blindingly umm, starts with an o, has three syllables, what is it? blindingly ... clear, but that isn't it exactly ... easy to think of.

The second isn't even a problem, though it would be if I were still a student or a teacher. I can't remember anything I've read for any length of time. I can pick up a book I read a month or two ago, reread it, and enjoy it as much as I did the first time. It's nice, because I read so fast that now I don't have to worry about running out of reading material. This isn't true of books I read years back, by the way; I remember those clearly.

Of course, there are always upsides to anything. It's a great excuse for any kind of forgetting or fogginess. Jerry once claimed that he had Chemobrain Through Lateral Transmission.