Prior to starting a regimen of CHOP chemotherapy at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, I sat down with my oncologist’s nurse who briefed me on some of the things I should expect from treatment, such as mouth sores, nausea, and other delightful stomach ailments that I had to look forward to. Never did she mention a word about post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment, also known as chemo brain.
Should you stop random people on the street and ask them what they think of when they think of chemotherapy, they will invariably rattle off some of the more commonly known side effects: nausea, vomiting, and hair loss. What is so exceedingly odd about this is that oncologists and oncology nurses appear to look at the side effects of chemotherapy in a fundamentally very similar way; as they are extremely focused on the short-term side effects, while completely ignoring the much more damaging and deleterious long-term side effects.
Following my first cycle of CHOP, I noticed that my brain was extremely foggy. Indeed, it was almost a feeling of intoxication. Six months after my last cycle, and I still feel that there are unequivocally times when that fogginess returns, and my concentration span is not what it is supposed to be.
While in treatment, some of the chemotherapy nurses who happily injected me with toxicity, would occasionally mention chemo brain, as if in jest. It became quite clear to me that their idea of chemo brain is three or four days of…