Saturday, January 14, 2006

7th, 8th & 9th Injections

The side-effects are certainly creeping up on me. The most noticeable thing is the tiredeness. I feel quite exhausted throughout the day. Strangely, I often find that when I finally do get to bed at night I have trouble falling asleep - which doesn't help with the tiredness the next day! A strong cup of coffee makes me feel much better, but you can only have so many strong coffees each day. In fact, lately I've had to limit myself to one a day. The second one usually makes me nauseous.
My job ends at the beginning of February. I'm glad now that I chose not to renew my contract. I'm going to need the break. Lately my work has become challenging for all the wrong reasons!
My platelets and white-cell counts are low. My nurse says they're not so low that I'll need to reduce my medicine just yet. That's good. I don't want to reduce my medicine. To me, reduced medicine means reduced chance of success.
They've asked me to come back for an eye test. I think that's just a standard thing that they do with everyone at this point. I'm glad of it, though, because I have actually been having some eye problems. I over-exerted myself one day, and I had blurry vision for the next two days. I've also had some pain behind my eyes.
I'm more irritable than I used to be. That is, I never used to be irritable at all, and now I am occasionally. This side-effect is also temporarily relieved by a strong cup of coffee.
I've found that Calendula cream is great for my itchy rashes. It's cooling and soothing.
So, all in all so far, I'm handling it. I only have a few weeks of work left and then I can rest, so I'm holding out for that. My aim now is to make a really good job of my last few weeks. It's tough to do a good job when you're tired and irritable, but I'm going to try anyway.