52. Chemo Brain and Aphasia
I’ve sent some friends an early draft of this post, and was debating whether I should put it here for everyone to see. Obviously I’ve decided 🙂 so here it is along with Doreen in an oversized bucket hat to represent chemo brain.
Two days ago, I realized I am not ready to start seeing clinic patients yet. I had a small group discussion (SGD; the Australian term is “tutorials”) with 3rd year medical students. I’ve been doing SGDs with students for about 6 weeks now since returning to work; however, previous sessions involved either a theoretical “paper case” or a patient the students had previously seen but was not present in the room. This was my first session with actual patients in a long time. Each group of 5 students was assigned to a patient; since there were 10 students, we had 2 patients this morning. They had to take a history [medical interview], examine the patient and present to me re: their differential diagnoses [a list of conditions that they think the patient has] + broad treatment plan.
Apparently I still have word-finding difficulties (like an anomic aphasia but not as bad as Broca’s aphasia), worse with Filipino compared to English. The challenges were (1) explain the patient’s condition in simpler terms, (2) translate my English thoughts into Filipino, and (3) a diagnosis that we thought was straightforward, but actually wasn’t… definitely used extra thinking that chemo brain had difficulty handling. Thankfully the students were smart and did really well in evaluating the patients. I told my friend Donna that I believe I made sense, but it was nerve-wracking to have actual patients + language issues ongoing at the same time, plus generally being out of practice with regard to giving patients instructions and advice.
“Brain fog” does not exactly describe what I have. It’s more of I know what I want to say, but I can’t say it – the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon. So frustrating. I was reading chemo brain improves by 9-12 months after chemotherapy (I am at a little over 7 months after the last session). It has definitely improved since then, but hopefully continues to get better.
By the way, here’s a hair update: I have full head coverage… the curly strands are about 2 inches long and I want them to hurry up with the growing. They now require a quick drying session in front of the electric fan (previously I would just let ambient air do the trick). At about 3 inches they will be long enough so that a hairstylist can actually do something, I want this “curly hair sticking up straight from my head everywhere like a chia pet” stage over with! [for those unfamiliar with chia pets, just google them]
