"Oh my god, your hair is so thin!" "Yeah, it falls out because I'm on low dose chemotherapy" "YOU HAVE CANCER?!?"
I dislike chemo. I've never been on enough to go bald or have completely debilitating side effects, but I've been close. A common medication used to control many autoimmune diseases including inflammatory arthritis, cancer, and, you guessed it, Crohn's disease is called methotrexate. Given by a subcutaneous injection once a week, this medication was AWFUL! The normal side effects from chemo were present. I'd get really really nauseous, weak, achey, light headed and just generally felt awful for about 24 hours after my injection. So basically, it was like having a violent stomach flu once a week. Not exactly a great time when you're living 6/7 parts of life.
After being on methotrexate for a couple of months I started to get anticipatory side effects. Yup, that is EXACTLY what it sounds like. BEFORE I took the injection I would start to get sick. Soon enough it started to spread into stuff that wasn't even related to my injection. If I saw colours that looked like the colour of the medication I would start to feel sick, I couldn't talk about the medication, I couldn't even think about it without feeling sick.
I had a funny experience when I went to a leadership retreat with a bunch of other young adults with chronic illness. Through conversation we deduced that about 3 or 4 of us had been on the ol' methotrexate. We talked about it for about 5 minutes, then all at once we all said "Can we stop talking about this?" And as I looked around, and grabbed a glass of water to settle my own stomach, I noticed the green tinge on my peers faces. Turns out I wasn't the only one to get anticipatory side effects.
I am not including an image of methotrexate because well, I'm starting to feel icky after writing this post. You can google it!
