I’m a feedback loop. We all are. When my mood is negative, I don’t take care of myself because I don’t give a crap. And when my body chemistry is off, e.g., low blood counts for example, I have a negative mood and thus am even less attentive to myself. Therefore, it’s a big feedback loop. If I felt like making a drawing with little arrows and boxes right now, I might hop over into one of those programs I have, but my modeling synapses are on medical leave.

This brings me to a trite little saying “Minding the Body to Mend the Mind”. I bet I’m not the first one to think of it, so it’s probably not original, but neither am I here to amaze the room (apologies to Jane Austen).

It’s been a rough few weeks really – after my final anthracycline chemo, anemia (low red counts leave you tired and depressed) and neutropenia (low white counts increase the likelihood of infection) set in. So I had an iron infusion, a white cell stimulating shot and heavy duty antibiotics to counter an an infection. But then the combination of low counts and antibiotics killed off the few happy bugs I had left in my body. And earlier this week, I woke up feeling crappy with a lovely green-yellow tinge to the tongue and it even looked furry. In German, the word for fungus is pilze, the same word used for mushroom. Tongue mushrooms. Yummm. Actually my tongue was the color of a porcini mushroom right before it goes off. Off to the oncologist for an anti-fungal tablet and an anti-fungal rinse. Fungus cleared up quickly and I felt normal. Hard to describe, but I almost expected to feel hair when I shook my head. I felt perky, and I started to get back in touch with a number of people I’m owing emails, phone calls and etc. Coming out of hiding. Haven’t felt like this in months.

So that brings me to the mind-body connection. I suppose that I knew this rationally all along – but it has never been more evident to me in the last few weeks as I experienced some intense depression brought about by lowered blood counts and both fungal and bacterial infections. The lowered blood counts are the primary culprits here, since they make the infections more likely – and as I said above, the antibiotics kill off all the happy digestive bugs making fungus more likely.

I know that when my counts were low, and I had infections, my thinking was unclear and depressed. My head felt foggy. There was a hopelessness hanging over me. This brings me to the hamster wheel, the perfect metaphor for hopelessness. A hamster on the never ending wheel of dismal circumstances. When I feel like this, it’s hard for me (as for many others with family history, no doubt) to disentangle myself with cancer from my mother with cancer. A few days ago I looked in the mirror – my eyes were tired, and my eyebrows were scant. I saw my mother looking back at me. When I feel better, I don’t recognize my mother in my face. Similarities change with mood.

When my infections were resolved, I suddenly felt much, much better. It was so odd. Like jumping off the hamster wheel and moving forward.