BREAST CANCER/CHEMOTHERAPY: SIDE EFFECTS
Nausea and Fatigue. There are many anti-nausea medications available; your physician and chemo nurse will work together with you to find out what works best for you. Modern pharmacology can go a long way toward alleviating, or at least minimizing, your physical reactions. There are three points at which you are likely to experience nausea: shortly after receiving IV chemotherapy, and/or twenty-four or forty-eight hours following the IV, and during the time you take Cytoxan pills (fourteen days of each month/cycle). The first problem can be helped by anti-emetic medication. The second problem, which may or may not happen to you, is comparable to morning sickness during pregnancy; this may slow you down, but will not incapacitate you or force you to radically curtail your normal activities. You may experience fatigue on and off over the course of each cycle. This will not be debilitating fatigue, and you will find that with some modification of your routine and your sleep schedule, you can manage to keep going.
The desired anti-cancer effects of chemotherapy are in no way directly related to the presence, absence, or intensity of side effects. The putative relationship is a kind of old wives’ tale that springs from the same source as the stories that frighten women unnecessarily about side effects during pregnancy—for example, if you are not violently ill with morning sickness, then something must be wrong with your baby.
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