The Recluse Report - July 2025 Part 1

16 July, 2025. 1,083 words.

It feels like I’ve had the absolute worst luck this month. The following is a rant about all the things that have kicked me in the nads so far this month. Perhaps this will make someone feel better about their own problems.

I have quite enough health issues to worry about, and then I caught a cold. Just a plain old, ordinary rhinovirus cold. Some people just power through colds. I’ve never understood that. My body screams at me and I can’t imagine a world where I could power through feeling so bad.

This cold hit particularly hard, perhaps because I haven’t had one in a long time, and/or because of all the other stuff my body is busy with. It feels like the worst cold I’ve ever had. Worse than that time I had COVID, by a mile.

It’s now over two weeks after I first woke up with a sore throat in the middle of the night and I still feel miserable from it. According to the standard timeline of a cold, the virus itself is long gone, it’s just all the lingering sinus drainage, which forces me to blow my nose every five minutes and cough with these great whooping, croupy coughs.

As I’m writing this, I’ve finally experienced two days in a row where my tortured nose and sinuses feel slightly better than the day before, instead of worse, so there’s some daylight at the end of the tunnel at least.

But the first weekend in July was a nightmare. I coughed so much from the cold that I hurt my lower back. So in addition to snot pouring from my nose all day every day, I’ve been hobbling and limping around the house, barely able to change my pants or take a shower.

I think the cold virus invaded my body exactly one day before I had an IR Port installed in my chest. A port is a little thing they embed under the skin of the chest that connects directly to a big vein, which makes it easier to deliver chemotherapy drugs. So I was recovering from mini-surgery and a cold at a the same time.

It’s not been a fun July for me so far.

The cold and back thing are getting slightly better each day, but it’s very slow going, and that’s because my body is also dealing with this minor thing called cancer, not to mention the two different cancer treatments I’ve started.

I’ve started taking a pill called Tagrisso every day. This pill is supposed to seek out and destroy cancer cells matching the EGFR lung cancer mutation. It also dries up the skin and causes rashes. My face and my upper chest have broken out into fields of little red dots that make me look like I belong in a leprosy colony.

Then I had my first chemotherapy infusion within a week of getting the IR Port and a few days after I started on the pill. They cleared me to go ahead with it despite recovering from a cold.

First, they draw some blood to make sure you’re healthy enough for the infusion (I think they’re looking at white blood count, among other things). Then, they sit you in a chair and start pumping you full of drugs (through the new IR Port in my chest): A steroid, an anti-nausea drug, a shot of B12, and something else I forgot.

That part took about 30 minutes. Then, the actual chemotherapy drugs. I get two. One is pemetrexed, which takes about 10 minutes, and the other is carboplatin, which takes about 30 minutes. I’ll get both every three weeks for four cycles, then I’ll switch to just pemetrexed.

Chemotherapy drugs are so serious that the nurse has to wear special blue protection when they handle the drugs, and they have to ask a second nurse to double-check the settings. They attach the plastic bags of drugs (along with a bag of saline) to a little machine with an LED display that delivers it all at a suitable rate straight into your bloodstream through the port.

I felt nothing during any of this process, except a heightened sense of energy from the steroid and B12 shot (I take steroids the day before and the day after, which also partially nausea). It felt like I’d drunk a hundred cups of coffee. (As I’m writing this, somewhere near the “nadir” of a cycle, the point where the body is weakest after a chemo infusion before recovering for the next cycle, that feeling is long gone.)

The Tagrisso pill kills cancer cells only, but chemotherapy works by killing all fast-dividing cells in the body, which includes cancer cells, but unfortunately also includes non-cancer cells like skin and hair and stomach cells, hence the standard chemotherapy side effects like hair loss and nausea. So far I haven’t experienced much in the way of nausea, but I have an assortment of prescriptions on hand in case I do.

My main issues are rashes and loss of appetite and constipation. I’ve lost a lot of weight. I have to force-feed myself every day, small meals because, while I don’t have nausea, eating too much makes my stomach feel a bit upset. I’ve started drinking Ensure supplements every day, and I’m trying to find ways of adding extra protein. It’s a major chore.

Anyway, that’s the gist of my July so far. A time I hope to soon forget. Mostly because of a stupid cold. Seriously, the cold and the related back injury has been way worse than any cancer-induced symptoms so far. It sounds like I’m joking but I’m definitely not.

P.S. As if recovering from a cold and chemotherapy wasn’t bad enough, my 2009 car has a new, unknown engine issue, after I just had the alternator replaced. I need to buy a new car. I can’t deal with the stress and anxiety of a car that may or may not break down on the way to a chemotherapy infusion. I also can’t deal with the stress and anxiety of buying a new car, but I have little choice.

P.P.S. And I’m pretty sure the outdoor cat I’ve been taking care of for years is either lost, dead, or found another home. He’s been very skittish since I had to go to the hospital and now I haven’t seen him for over a week, which has never happened before.

This month can go jump right in a lake.

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