I found an interesting
Blog about chemobrain that I wanted to share. It has been 4 years since I had standard chemotherapy, and I still am feeling the effects. I have a horrible time with word retrieval, processing new information, and reading maps. I also have a hard time computing simple math problems and just focusing on anything in general. My ADD and attention span had gotten much worse, making it hard to get anything done. Basically every mental task takes twice as long and I get really frustrated with my broken brain. I don't feel like I can be a safe nurse practitioner anymore. Not only do I have to relearn everything I forgot, but it is also really hard to acquire new information- which is problematic as clinicians are constantly having to adapt to new practice standards and guidelines. I find myself more interested in positions that only require physical skills- jobs where I use my hands and not my slow brain. So after all that schooling, the positions I have been pursuing of late are in the fields I was in before graduate school- bartending and gymnastics. I think that this is because I feel comfortable using skills I have already developed, rather than having to constantly struggle with learning new tasks. It's a waste, but sometimes it just takes too much mental energy to try and learn something new. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to concentrate on the task at hand, which is then followed by the struggle to comprehend the information and put it into memory. I feel dumb a lot of the time, and embarrassed by the length of time it takes for me to figure something out that other people find so simple. This is especially hard for me now, because I have acquired new friends that only know the slow me and not the intelligent and knowledgeable person I once was.
This month I meet with a neuropsychologist who can hopefully point me in the right direction. Most of the reason I wanted to meet with her was to get cognitive testing and see if I qualify for disability. My symptoms negatively affect most aspects of my life, but I don't know if the federal government will actually recognize chemobrain as a disability. I ultimately would like to discharge my student loans. Plus I want some validation of my worries that I am too damaged to work in medicine. I need some sort of explanation or excuse to why I never found an ARNP job. I feel worthless and stupid talking about it, and when people ask me about my career or what I went to school for, I don't even mention nursing school. Last weekend at a music festival a girl asked me what I did, and i actually forgot that I worked as a nurse in biometrics. I don't get called in to work many shifts, so I guess that's understandable. However, I surprised myself that I only answered that I was a bartender. It's like the whole nursing part of my life never existed. I am back in 2006, bartending and coaching gymnastics- only with $100,000+ in student loans.
Well that's my rambling for the time- being. I also got a CT scan last week and still haven't heard the results. It was only a CT because obamacare doesn't find PET scans very necessary for cancer follow up :/
