I have had no disorientation, Mikey. Different people have different Cancers so require different drugs. I think I drove myself to get the follow up shot once alone. Otherwise we hardly go anywhere alone. Not because of the treatment but it just works out that way. I have heard of "Chemo Brain" and when I can't find something or forget something, I blame it on that.
2 Vetts, as with you, I don't know what to say. My husband struggles with depression but takes Celexa and it has helped so much. He knows he didn't wish this disorder on himself and is unable to make it stop by himself. He feels so much better and is so much easier to live with since he started meds about 5 years ago. A while ago, he decided to not take it anymore and I didn't know it. We were getting ready for a bunch of company and Pete was setting the dining room table and I was telling him what to do. He became so combative and ornery. I had noticed it earlier in the week but didn't say anything. But that day I asked him, "Have you stopped taking your meds?" He looked up and said he had. I told him that I could tell and had noticed it earlier in the week. He decided he didn't like himself off the meds and began taking it again. He realized that if he was making life difficult for me and it could be controlled with a simple pill, he would take it.
Just about every illness out there has a "history" of behavior and a history of research and records of treatment. As different things are tried over the years, they have determined what works best or what doesn't work. They develop a "protocol" of treatment and go with what historically works best. Again different people may have a different response to the treatment. I have never heard of a guarantee issued by the medical people but they do know what typically works best.
For instance, when it was determined that my infection was under the port and it was MRSA, they knew what kinds of side affects accompany it. They immediately performed a cat scan on the liver because they knew that often it causes problems there. Also that MRSA critter likes to light on the heart valves and cause problems there so I wore a heart monitor all the while in the hospital. A cold sore started on my lip and the infectious disease doctor ordered cold sore medicine and I'm still taking it. He said that if my body typically made them when the immune system was down then certainly during Chemo I would probably have a lot of them. He said also that they knew that the antibiotic given for 6 weeks had history of killing the MRSA and keeping it down, when they tried it for 4 weeks, they had some reoccurance. So now protocol says to do it for 6 weeks. Then, when my oxygen levels werer low, they began to suspect that because of the cancer I had developed blood clots. Sure enough there they were. So now I'm on a blood thinner. Again, I was NEVER given a guarantee that any of the treatments would work. In fact, that is part of the paperwork I signed again and again, basically I was signing that I understood that if something went wrong, I couldn't blame the medical staff.
