The days are a blur. Christmas was barely noticed, as is the Hew Year. Cannot stay up to celebrate the coming of the new year. I guess I will have to celebrate when I wake up in the morning.
This is a chemo week. My oncologist’s New Year present. Went in for blood work on Tuesday morning in preparation for my date with the Chemo Daycare. I love the nurses in this unit. There appears to be little pressure on them. They are calm, efficient, attentive, and always smiling. We joke around a bit. One of the nurses is calling me by my first name, which is cool. She is the one who has had breast cancer and gone through the chemo experience. Very reassuring and listens should I decide to rant or anything.
I have been asked by Wellspring to participate in a study with the outfit that runs the Brain Fog sessions. These sessions are meant to increase your cognitive abilities. They need to know if the sessions are working or not. I agreed to participate. What else do I have to do?
I attended the session on Tuesday morning. It was supposed to last between 60 and 90 minutes. But I talk fast, so it ended a bit earlier. Hah! The study was interesting. They made me sign a consent form, I barely skimmed through it. Big mistake. The first question had to do with recalling what was on the consent form. I recalled one item, which turned out to be the most important one. Lucky me. Don’t ask me what it was. Don’t remember it any more.
The rest of the questions were interesting. They read out a list of words, and you had to recall as many as you could. They would reread the list to allow you to add to the recall. Never recalled all of them. To make matters worse, they asked you how many of the words you recalled about 30 minutes later. That is cheating.
Same with a bunch of number. They kept adding one number to the list and you had to repeat the numbers starting from the first one. They showed you a drawing which you had to replicate. Nothing complicated, but reasonably involved. Of course, they asked to draw it again 30 minutes later. Cheaters. I aced that one.
And the questions went on. They read you a snippet of a story from a paper and you had to repeat the story word for word.They asked you how many years of schooling you have had starting from day one. Are you kidding me? I changes countries three times, and schools I don’t know how many times. This might be fine for someone who grew up in one, or maybe two countries, but not for a migrant habitue, as it were.
I had to fill out these forms full of questions. Like, do you miss sign posts when you are driving? I told the police officer I was suffering when I went through the Stop sign, but he did not believe me, honest. Nah, no problem there. It was a long list. The only one that I highlighted was the trouble I have with reading. You keep reading the same page over and over again, until you realise the futility of what you are doing. Having said that, I just finished reading two books by Malcolm Gladwell. What a lovely writer he is.
The moderator decided that I was doing fine.
The session starts on January 12. Will keep you posted.
Wednesday was chemo day. Janet came with me. I decided to sleep through the process and she went shopping. Easy peasy, as they say.
The rest of the week was spent recovering from the chemo. We went shopping on Saturday because Janet was going a bit stir crazy from being in the house all the time. Went to see It’s Complicated on Sunday, to which all I have to say is Not! Chick flick.
That’s all there is.