Cycle 6 – Day 10: Off Balance

Well, something new is going on. For the last three days I’ve been experiencing what I’ll call “dizziness”. This is something different from the periodic experience of getting up and feeling very light-headed and the possibility of fainting.

This new dizziness, loss of balance is a constant thing where I need to exert extra effort to walk in a straight line and find myself holding on to things to steady myself.  I checked in with my oncology nurse and she’s going to discuss with the doctor. I’ve not heard back yet. The advice was I it was “bad” or I was super concerned to go to the ER. Not there yet, so I’ll wait it out for a bit more and see what happens. My GP is booked up and I couldn’t get an appointment until near the end of the month.

I did a little shopping today which involved a lot of head swivelling and looking around which really aggravated the symptoms. After a while my stomach started to feel a little queasy. Sitting still and lying down are all good. Not exactly conducive to being active and getting things done.

I rode the bike yesterday for a couple of hours and surprisingly it didn’t cause too much trouble. The ride was pretty good for the first 50km and then I really started to feel tired.

The cold, which is still hanging on into week three now, seemed to cause me to struggle on the slightest climbing efforts and breathe abnormally hard. Also, an annoying running nose which just wouldn’t let up probably didn’t help.

Over the last few days when lying down, rolling over or getting up I had a cough. Not the typical tickle in the throat cough but one where you breathing fine, then there is an increasing gurgling feeling in your chest that increases with each breath until you are forced to cough and then it goes away for a while (minutes) and then is starts all over again. After a longer period of time (30-60 minutes) as long as I don’t change positions, it settles down and I can try to fall asleep. A couple of nights were nasty as getting up for the bathroom triggers the whole coughing thing and the meds & extra water intake are making getting up in the night a frequent event. Thankfully, last night, no coughing! Hopefully, that’s over.

Another highlight for today, the last injection of Grastofil ! Yahoo!