Sylvia Vizcaya-Alderson
tried to prepare, in advance, for the side effects of her chemotherapy
treatment. She shaved her curly hair before her first chemo session in
June 2000, preferring to face her new silhouette in the mirror, to
learn how to tie scarves, before the nausea and fatigue kicked in. She
fixed up the guest room for those nights when she'd be too ill to
sleep. She stocked up on applesauce. But what she couldn't prepare
for, what she didn't know was a possibility, was that her husband and
friends would have to repeat themselves again and again. That she
couldn't remember anything.
Even in 2000, when the assortment
of cognitive difficulties commonly dubbed "chemobrain" were
regularly discussed in medical journals, no one told the 46-year-old
Santa Fe, New Mexico resident that the potent drugs used to treat her
Stage II breast cancer might also sap her ability to recall names or
concentrate on a book. "I used to have an elephant memory, a
steel-trap mind-the whole bit," says Vizcaya-Alderson. "I
accept the fact now that I'm completely fallible."
Despite years of complaints from
patients and survivors about problems with memory, word retrieval and
concentration, only in the last 10 or so years has medical science
validated chemobrain's existence, confirming that these symptoms can't
be explained away by other difficulties many patients and survivors
experience: fatigue, depression, the early onset of menopause.
Still, numerous research gaps
persist. Little is known about which drugs are most likely to induce
the problem, and who is most likely to get it.
