Cherry Slush Legs

Post-chemo day 3 has arrived, and so has the usual fatigue, nausea and nerve pain.

Something I’ve never had to do until recently is to elaborately describe how I feel, physically. Doctors and nurses are constantly asking about my chemotherapy responses and the effects I’m getting — and I’m so accustomed to just ignoring it, or just dealing with any physical pain without saying anything, that I have to stop and really think about what’s actually wrong.

I keep having to try to describe this leg thing to doctors. It’s like they just want to “officially” attribute it to an existing side effect and give it a “why”. But every nurse and doctor wants to know about it, so I’m constantly trying to find new ways to describe it to make sense.

So I have a new description.

Last night, Robert took us all to Sonic because I wanted a red cherry slush (cherry flavored anything is my weakness, don’t judge me). I gave myself a crazy brain freeze and thought, holy crap, this is what my legs feel like after chemo! Yes! A few days after each chemo, my legs feel like they have brain freeze (leg freeze?).

It’s like an internal pain, weakness and shakiness from within my legs that feels like I’ve frozen them and they’re thawing out. Except the thaw out is taking days and it’s constant pain… and putting my tongue on the roof of my mouth doesn’t fix it. Oh, and my legs aren’t actually cold. They just have the pain that one would associate with being really cold.

Does this make sense? Maybe I need to go back to the drawing board. Or maybe just back to bed.