Chemo Brain is Real

I have now spent almost two months trying to remember Peter's last name. 

I first met Peter on the wide beach at East Hampton, having been invited out by a rich guy I was dating at the time. Peter was everything the rich guy was not to me, and with the setting sun casting out those late complimentary rays, he was a beach god. I was smitten and have stayed smitten with him ever since, though I haven't seen him in years.

I also can't remember his last name. 

Everyone has moments--at all ages--when a piece of information escapes you, and you allow its retrieval to percolate until in the middle of unrelated conversation you blurt out: "Peter's last name was...".  I am still waiting for that to happen.

The loss of words in the middle of typing (denoting conversation for me), very common ones, the loss of conversations that are alluded to or referenced, the loss of names, these are losses that are piling upon me, too many to be accidental, some too deeply felt to be anything less than disasterous.

Chemo brain (It's real!) describes a loss of or change of function, particularly in language and memory for me. I look at the long path projected for me with chemo, I look at the 2 1/2 years where it has dominated my schedule, and I begin to piece together its effects. I'm luckily not a guy who suffers outsized reactions to chemo. I had trouble breathing on Taxol if it was pumped in too fast. I had and occasionally still have the Erbitux rash on my back (very itchy but don't scratch), nothing unexpected though, nothing big.

But the small effects, the water that begins to back up as the beaver completes its dam, I am starting to see. I feel an acute difference in my energy and my overall sense of wellness after a couple of weeks away from chemo.  As I recover from pneumonia, as I heal from the after-shocks of my April surgery, I feel how good it is not to pound my system down as I'm trying to build it up. Names still escape me though. Common words fade as I'm midstream in thought and need them. 

I worry about dementia. I want to know myself, and you, and the where/how/whys of my situation up to the moment these things no longer matter. While these are different afflictions, I worry that such weakenings now encourage vulnerabilities later, and that if dementia is part of my genetic gift, its rising supremacy is triggered by my unwilling surrender of an artist's name, the brand of garbage bag I use, Peter, life.

See, it's not just cancer. We are ecosystems so utterly interconnected that loss of any sort echoes through us finding like problems, encouraging negativity, and gains, small victories, build cities, fix fire damage, bring names back from a dive in the deepest Mayan sinkhole littered with artifacts of this interesting life.