Good morning, John.

So, the thing about the way that I’m getting chemotherapy is that they really dose you. They hit you super hard on Friday, and then you get one Friday off, and then they hit you super hard again on the Friday after that. And the whole idea of this is that the four different chemo drugs that I am taking, they do a good job of interfering with cells that are currently in the process of dividing a lot, which are cancer cells but also some other cells, and so it makes you feel sick. 

Like it way disproportionately kills cancer cells, but it also kills normal body cells, and so that makes you feel terrible. And they want people to stay in treatment and not feel too bad, and they also want to minimize complications that you do get if you have too many negative side effects piled on top of each other. And so they let you recover, and I’m feeling so normal right now, before they smack you back down, which is happening at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning. 

And this schedule turns out to be very good, so far at least, for Vlogbrothers. So I have a full week of recovery before it’s time to make the first Vlogbrothers video, which maybe I’ll do next week. And then I’ll have 2 full weeks of recovery before it’s time to make the next Vlogbrothers video. Fantastic.

And here’s a weird thing: by like day 6 after treatment, I have felt like 100% of the bad feelings in my body were because I had just been lazy and spending too much time in bed, not walking around enough, not getting my body moving, and I was achy, I just felt gross. But dear Hank from the past and also Hank from the future: you felt bad because of the chemo. 

I feel much better now, and I am just as lazy as I was a week ago. It's a weird thing to do to your body. I mean, top five weirdest chemo side effects: hiccups, from the Dexamethasone, which actually- is kind of a chemotherapy drug, but mostly you take it to hold back nausea and feel a little bit better after getting your treatment. Hiccups, intractable hiccups- I probably had like 12 bouts of hiccups last more than 30 minutes over the course of 2 days. It's miserable.

Red urine, which you might think, "I'm dying!" but in fact is just one of the drugs is a red color and it can come out in your urine. And also your sweat. Which makes me ask: what kind of person is sweating during chemo? Like I am not exerting at all. But yeah, you can get enough of this drug in you that your sweat is actually pink like a freaking hippo. Hippos have pink sweat. It protects them from the sun. So they don't get skin cancer maybe. 

Salivary gland pain. Didn't realize that that was possible. The moment I saw a dish of food it would hurt, because my salivary glands would activate and start creating saliva, and for whatever reason they were recovering from injury, and it was physically painful to drool.

I thought I had a UTI, but it turns out chemo can just make your urethra hurt. Is that TMI? I don't know. 

And last, this one is super normal and I had just had never heard about it, but your mouth gets sore. Like it can get so bad that you can get sores in your mouth, which hasn't happened to me, but like your tongue feels bad and your under-tongue- like everything in your mouth just feels sore. 

None of those, however, have been the worst side effects for chemo for me. I've been very lucky to have been spared nausea, had a little bit, but nothing big. But I've had a headache the entire time, it's much less bad than it was.

But for me, the biggest and hardest side effect is just the fatigue. It does not feel possible to be that tired. And I've felt that bad- like when I had Covid, it was a similar feeling of fatigue. It is hard to move your arm enough to grab the Gatorade bottle. Getting up to go to the bathroom was work. 

And you might think, "Hank- he's putting on a brave face during his chemo." But no, I'm not. I feel better now because I'm on the last day before I get walloped again. And very importantly, different people's chemo regiments are very different. People respond differently and people are taking different drugs, so I'm not trying to represent the universal experience here.

And they say hair loss begins day 14, which is tomorrow. So. I told Orin about the hair loss and he said, "But when does it grow back?" And I told him, "You know, it's going to take a while, but it will grow back." And he felt fine about that, so if he feels fine, then I feel fine. Everybody should feel fine. 

John, I'll see you on Tuesday. 

And here's some pictures of some flowers and bees that I took in my garden. Very nice, isn't it. Glad that this happened when the weather was nice. It would have been miserable in the winter. 

Can you believe this freaking flower? I think I'm on a journey of meaning.