Psychosomatic Tendencies

I was wondering how I would get through 18 weeks of immunosuppressive chemotherapy without getting a cold. The answer is that I wouldn’t – not get a cold, that is. I’m still planning to get through the chemo.

I’ve always had psychosomatic tendencies. Suggest it and I feel like I’m getting it. If someone in the next cube over coughs, I think I have a sore throat. Someone in the marketing department has the stomach flu? Now I think I’m feeling a little queasy. After my dad’s heart attack a dozen years ago, I felt certain I had chest pains, too. I even had myself checked by a doctor, who had me wear a Holter monitor for 24 hours. It revealed no problems.

That last example is a bit unusual – I usually know better than to chase to the doctor on the mere suggestion of my fears. In fact, because of my psychosomatic tendencies, I’m usually pretty slow to “officially” declare myself sick. Not that anyone I know would believe it – my friends seem to see me as being sick a lot, although at work I almost always finish the year out with sick days remaining (yes, I’m the stick-in-the-mud who takes them when she’s actually ill). Nevertheless, my tendencies have caused me more than a little stress throughout my life.

And I also wonder if they didn’t help to seed this cold that I’ve been plagued with. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I know this cold is the result of exposure to a virus, and I’ve been around plenty of coughing, hacking, wheezing people. But I wonder if I primed myself to be vulnerable to the exposure. A week after my third chemo, when my white count dropped (per usual), my nurse made a huge deal of it. She seemed on the verge of suggesting that I not go to work, although she wouldn’t quite say it. In fact, I got the distinct impression she was trying to get me to suggest it. Little did she know that I had two coughing, wheezing parents at home, so what did it matter if I were at work or not.

Despite the fact that I had felt fine before my conversation with her, the minute I got off the phone with my nurse, I felt a bit of tightness in my chest. “Oh no, here I go again. Is that that a cough about to come up?” It was all I could do to concentrate on my job for the rest of the day, especially with the thunderous coughing of all my ill coworkers surrounding me. From then on, my constant worry was avoiding a cold. I used so much hand sanitizer I thought my skin would peel off. I hid in my cube and practically shrunk away from coworkers who stopped by. I couldn’t exactly avoid my parents at home, but I did don a procedural mask at times, attempting to block out their unhealthy vapors.

All my efforts were, alas, to no avail. To be honest, I think I was starting to get this cold before my last chemo treatment – my nose was running a bit, but the big give-away was the start of a cough. On the other hand, my fear of getting sick was running so high that I wasn’t entirely sure which sensations to trust. Okay, plus I was playing the “if-I-don’t-admit-it-it’s-not-so” game. I probably should have ‘fessed up before treatment, but I wanted the treatment to be on schedule. Besides, my pre-chemo blood work was okay, and my pre-chemo steroids suppressed the symptoms. So I had my fourth chemo on schedule.

Of course, after I got off my post-chemo steroids, my cold symptoms reemerged. So I finally admitted to myself that I had a cold and called the oncologist's office. My nurse sounded unhappy with me, like it was my fault for getting this cold. She’s the one who put the idea in my head in the first place! Her advice? Take my temperature every day between 3 and 4 PM and call if I’m running a fever or if my symptoms get worse. That and “force fluids.”

So I’ve been sucking down water as fast as I can and thinking about the mind/body connection. On one hand, awareness of my body and of something just not being right helped me get my cancer diagnosed while it was in Stage 1. On the other, hyper-awareness may have stressed me out and predisposed me to this cold. So what’s a poor chemo patient to do? I guess the answer is to focus on what is in each moment, not on what I’m afraid will be in the next. In other words, the usual struggle of my life:  the effort to experience the present moment and act on its reality, rather than react to my fears.