- chemo side effects pattern (+ old cancer symptoms) -

for those curious, I copy-pasted the exact chemo regimen from my doctors notes, so here’s what I’m getting exactly:

Premeds:

Regimen:

Every 28 days for up to 6 cycles.

DAY 0 (Day of chemo treatment):

Tired/Sleepy. Both during and after chemo, I usually feel pretty tired and nap for several hours as soon as I get home. Feeling tired typically only lasts for the day and I’m back to normal by tomorrow.

Dehydration. The next day I get extremely thirsty and drink lots of water. This usually lasts a day or two.
Gross saliva. For at least 3 days following chemo, my saliva has a fairly gross taste. This can sometimes make me feel a little nauseous. Sucking on candy can help with this.
Acne clears up. A kind of neat thing about chemo is that my acne goes away soon after treatment and my face looks all nice and acne free. (Plus my skin feels all soft, I love touching it) (BUT this is only temporary)
Face really fuckin’ itches. While getting rid of the acne is nice, when it starts getting killed off, it’s SUPER itchy which fuckin sucks for a good 2 days or so.

Tender skin. Lasting about three days, most of the exterior of my body feels tender and sore. Almost like a mild sunburn. It isn’t really painful, more just annoying.
Worsened emotional state. It seems to last about the same time as the tender skin, I just feel incredibly depressed and irritable.

Migraines. Starting about six days in and lasting until the following chemo, every morning I get a mild headache that grows progressively worse over the course of the day until it’s it’s just awful at night. Tylenol/Ibuprofen help temporarily but not very well. The most effective fix is caffeine. If I have a moderate amount in the morning, I’m good for the next 24 hours.

Acne breakout. While it’s cool that chemo gets rid of my acne, it’s only temporary and after a week or so, it comes back surprisingly bad. Like, the acne is BAD. Sometimes it breaks out around my eyes and stuff and it’s really gross.

The above stuff repeats fairly consistently after every chemo session. The below stuff just kinda happens in general

Mouth sores. Easily the worst symptom by far. Talking and eating become agonizingly painful. This tends to last for a little less than a week. The best thing to take for it is Prevention Oncology Mouth Rinse. Magic Mouthwash can also be pretty good (though that’s mostly just a painkiller).
Hair Loss. duh. although it honestly hasn’t been that bad so far. It’s definitely thinning about quite a bit, but I was expecting it to be worse. (so far, haven’t buzzed my head yet, might happen soon)
Skin peeling. Mostly on the ends of my fingertips. It’s kinda gross but whatever.

thankfully, all of these went away sometime after either my first or second chemo treatment

Chronic Back Pain. Started around June 2023. I’m assuming some lymphoma was fucking up my sciatic nerve or something.
Fever. More often than not I would be absolutely freezing my ass off. But of course, sometimes it would flip and instead I’d be sweating my ass off, which brings me to:
Night Sweats. Because of how cold I’d usually get, I’d always bundle the fuck up every time I go to bed, but then at some point while I was asleep, my body decided it was actually hot and I would wake up every single morning drenched in an ungodly amount of sweat.
Weak bladder. Any liquid I’d ever drink would shoot straight through my system, which is super annoying for everyday life, but even worse when I’m trying to sleep, I’d have to wake up at least three times in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. It sucked.
Fatigue. This was actually a product of the anemia I used to have, but I was anemic because of cancer. It was depleting the hemoglobin levels in my blood. After my blood transfusion and another chemo treatment or two, the cancer finally quit messing with my hemoglobin and now it’s rising back up to normal :)