Types of pain

Here’s a departure from the sentimental rants in my previous posts. Would you prefer a dull type of discomfort that hangs out in the background but stays with you all day? Or a sharp, in-your-face type of pain that only comes on once in a while?

I’m not asking this because I had a choice between the two. But I did wonder which one I hated more, after experiencing both types of pain during my chemotherapy.

The dull pain I’m talking about is nausea. While a lot of times it would come on randomly and only last for a few hours, there were days – typically during or right after the chemo – when the nausea persisted from early morning to late night. Basically, it’s like how you feel after a day of heavy drinking. No one likes that. The one major difference from a hangover is that the hospital food is terrible, so smelling and, worse, eating it makes the nausea much stronger. Often, it leads to throwing up, which is about the only time when the discomfort stops being in the background.

The other type of pain is mucositis, which is basically sores in the mouth and throat. People typically get one mouth sore randomly pop up somewhere on the inner cheek or lip. With this, you get a bunch in your mouth, on your tongue and in your throat. If I’m sitting around minding my own business, there’s not much discomfort. But when I have to drink or eat, that’s when I feel the pain ‘in my face’. Biting food is hard because the tongue is affected, and swallowing is even harder. Also – with a warning of TMI – not only the mouth and throat get inflamed by the chemotherapy, but the entire gastrointestinal tract, down to the bottom. To say it more plainly, going ‘number two’ sucked.

So there, the two things I arguably hated the most about chemo. But I have to give it to nausea. It was more debilitating. It made me want to sleep during the day in hopes of it passing. And when I wasn’t sleeping, I felt like it was wearing out my brain, and I couldn’t think straight and do anything productive.

Plus, anti-nausea medicine only helps the symptoms a little. Which I can say the same for the pain medication I took for the mouth sores, but at lease the latter made me feel nice, if you know what I mean.