Chemotherapy: "The Fog of Everyday Life"

“Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings.”

-- Helen Keller 1880-1968: “My Religion” (1927)

The topic of the day is chemo brain. What prompted my interest in this is the recent spate of news articles expounding on the subject of medically prescribed chemicals and the cognitive perils that follow. Yes, there have been many pieces on the deleterious effects of toxic healing, the forgetfulness, lack of focus, dyslexia, neuropathy and such, but the one that caught my attention most recently was Dan Barry’s paean to chemo, “My Brain on Chemo: Alive and Alert” (NYT 9/1/09).

By Barry’s lights, I am a member of the “chemotherapy alumni corps.” Without getting naked on the first page, let me just say I have not garnered the wisdom that comes with multiple chemotherapies: a knowledge of just how insidious good health, a condition marked by what Barry calls, “the haze of the everyday,” can be. Barry sees this state of mind as a pre-existing human condition.” Absent the influence of serious illness, the beauties of the world and our existence in it are blindly taken for granted:

”Cancer, as it is often said, tends to focus the mind. But my diagnosis hovered in the theoretical until the moment I began six rounds of chemotherapy….The nurse hung clear bags of clear, innocent-looking liquid from an IV pole, found a plump vein along my right arm – and the fog slowly lifted.”

Never mind that should the Vincristine miss its mark, the stuff will burn through your arm like alien blood through the decks of the Nostromo. Of course, Barry’s right, one gains a new lease on life via the recognition that it’s terminal. Old leases don’t recognize borrowed time and permanent sublets. Barry offers a description of chemo brain he poses as, “the common definition’s opposite.” He sees the experience of suffering as a kind of redemption from the sleep of existential inattention; a numbness towards the world that fades as the lack of feeling in feet and fingers bring on a fumbling and stumbling toward a thanatoptic epiphany less a death wish than the Dickinsonian recognition that although none of us can stop for death, he will kindly, and inevitably, stop for us.

Barry writes, “Gradually, from midsummer to late fall….the chemo wiped away the muddle, revealing the world in all its mundane glory.” His point, and one I agree with, is this: as one returns to health, that precious attitude of appreciation for the world and those in it, recedes into a “pre-existing condition” of negative-mindfulness, a kind of blasé disenchantment and apathy toward the gift of living. I share Barry’s sentiments. Twice he experienced chemo, and twice he fell from grace with himself.

I, too, know that feeling of drifting from one’s context; of forgetting that most beautiful perspective being physically compromised brings; of naturally refraining from a judgmental and careless attitude towards others that marks a lack of grace; of feeling a narrow-mindedness slowly creeping and seeping back; and of experiencing that “fog of the everyday returning to enshroud me.”