The word 'ovarian cancer' frightened me, but the words 'we are going to start chemotherapy' frightened me more. Surgery is over once it is over, but chemo comes with a set number of rounds, so the figure I still had to face was lodged in my mind. Cycle one, cycle two... cycle six. I had no idea those six would feel so long.
My hair started falling out around the second cycle. I sat blankly for a long while after seeing it come off in clumps on my pillow. In the end I had it shaved short at a salon, and I cried, not because the face in the mirror was unfamiliar, but because the thought hit me: 'Ah, I have really become a patient.' Still, after I bought a few hats and scarves, my mind oddly settled a little. Once I accepted that it would fall out, that was one less thing to fret over every day.
The hardest thing to bear was the loss of strength. With the first cycle, a few days of lying down brought me back, but with each round, recovery took longer and longer. By around the fourth cycle, I wanted to sink to the floor even while hanging laundry. The sense that my body was no longer mine, that frustration of a clear mind in a body that would not follow, was what grieved me most.
My appetite kept changing too. Foods I usually loved tasted of metal, and there were days when just the smell turned my stomach. On those days, rather than forcing myself to eat properly, I took small, frequent bites of whatever would go down. A few cool slices of fruit, a bowl of lukewarm porridge, I could not have been more grateful for them. A tingling in my fingertips and toes also crept in as the cycles piled up; I had been told to be sure to mention it to my doctor, so I reported it at every visit without fail.
Looking back, what helped me most was nothing grand. A single piece of candy from a roommate in the ward, a nurse's 'your numbers look fine today' as she drew my blood, a cup of warm water my husband heated without a word. These small things carried me through the day. Someone breathing beside me mattered more than cheers from far away.
On the day I finished my sixth and final round, there was no applause or anything like that. I just took my infusion as always and came home along the road I always took. But as I looked out the car window, the sunlight felt unusually warm. Finishing does not make everything better at once, yet I was proud of myself simply for having passed through those six. If someone is in the very middle of it now, I would tell them not to look too far ahead, but just to get safely through one round, today.
This article shares one person's personal experience and does not replace medical advice or care. Any decisions about symptoms or treatment should be made in consultation with your own care team.