Chemo Brain – Frantic Shanti

Memory and Attention Adaptation Training (MAAT): Finding a Way to Deal with Chemo Brain

So, as I’ve written about in previous posts (here and here) there’s this thing called ‘chemo brain’, and contrary to what you might find when you google it, it doesn’t necessarily go away after you finish cancer treatment. It also has a longer name: Cancer-Related Cognitive Impairment (CRCI).

This can be particularly frustrating for those of us who are expected to perform “as before” (meaning, prior to getting cancer) and yet increasingly fall victim to distractions, searching for words, forgetting things as soon as we’re told them, and in general, wondering whether we’ve now come down with a mix of dementia and ADHD.

You’ll need more than a bouquet of forget-me-nots to navigate post-cancer issues like CRCI. Classes like MAAT can help.

There is help, however, and it’s arrived in the form of a class called Memory and Attention Adaptation Training (MAAT). I had the opportunity to take this 8-week class in Fall 2022 and it recently concluded.

The class is intelligently put together, first showing students the science about what they are experiencing (and that it’s not early-onset dementia!), and then over the next two months, teaching tricks and techniques for helping navigate the new landscape of CRCI.

This includes learning stress management techniques, improving sleep and pacing oneself, making self-care a high priority. But the majority of the class was devoted to learning how to use methods such as rehearsal/repetition, situational awareness, scheduling, distraction reduction, active listening and imagery. These help us maintain focus and retain information while reducing overwhelm.

It takes more than littering your desk with post-it notes. We need to create an environment that supports memory storage and distraction reduction.

I took the class through SHARP Hospital in the San Diego, CA area as part of their second cohort. It was taught by a clinical oncology social worker (herself a breast cancer survivor) and a speech pathologist, and their expertise made the class even more worthwhile. While the first cohort was in person, we in the second cohort had the benefit of taking the class via Zoom, which helped with accessibility, especially for those of us who are still working.

And a number of us there were already about 3-5 years out of treatment, which dispells the notion that chemo brain only lasts during treatment. Our cohort members’ ages ran the gamut from early 30s to well into retirement, illustrating that CRCI can show up in any cancer survivors regardless of age.

Realizing that this is affecting many more people that have been reporting symptoms, the SHARP Health Care system has opened the classes to individuals in other health systems in the San Diego area.

No matter where you live, if you are a cancer survivor experiencing some form of cognitive impairment, I urge you to 1) tell your oncological team (They need to know this is happening!) and 2) ask them about the availability of MAAT classes in your region. MAAT is not currently being offered widely, so please make your needs known so that this service can be expanded to those who need it.

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Curiously enough, one of the first assignments we had in the MAAT class was to work with gratitude – yes, it really does help! Such a perfect practice to begin at this time of the year! Happy Holidays to all! ❤

“Scatterbrained”: Yeah, Chemo Brain is Real

After a few years of wondering what the heck is going on with my head, I joined a Memory and Attention Adaptation Training (MAAT) class generously provided by my cancer center (which I’ll be posting about on a later date).

This is gratifying on two levels: first, that I can learn new strategies for dealing with the memory issues and distractibility that have been plaguing me since finishing breast cancer treatment five years ago; and second, and perhaps more important to me emotionally, that what I am experiencing is REAL. It’s officially termed Chemotherapy Related Cognitive Impairment (CRCI) or, informally, chemo brain.

I’ve been told that “you’re imagining this” (I’m not) or “you’ve always been like this” (I haven’t) or “just focus harder” (I AM!!!) or even “this is just an excuse” (Argh! No!), coming from people who have been annoyed by my memory lapses.

Chemo brain spends a lot of time just wandering around without an idea of how to get anywhere.

My brain isn’t lazy. As a matter of fact, it’s the opposite problem. My brain is too busy.

In the MAAT class, we learned of a study from the University of British Columbia (UBC) by Kam et al. (2016, Clin Neurophysiol) that examined what happens inside those brains that suffer cognitive impairment from cancer treatment, even years later. In that published study, the experimental group consisted of nineteen breast cancer survivors. All had undergone chemotherapy for early stage breast cancer and had subsequently self-reported cognitive issues.

Researchers at UBC compared these survivors against twelve (non-cancer) control subjects in a task that required sustained attention. All the participants’ brains were monitored via electroencephalogram (EEG) both while working on the task and while at rest.

The results were vindicating for me and, I’m sure, for others experiencing this. Normal brains cycle through periods of focus and periods of “wandering”. However, as the UBC researchers stated in a summary of their results (published here): “We found that chemo brain is a chronically wandering brain, they’re essentially stuck in a shut out mode.”

This was true even when the breast cancer survivors thought that they were focusing. Furthermore, the survivors’ brains exhibited activity even when they were instructed to relax.

Great. We know that chemo brain is an undeniable fact for some cancer survivors and can last for years — in this study, up to three years. However, for me and some of the people in my MAAT class, it’s been five years and we’re still dealing with this, which is frustrating. What can be done about it?

When anxiety and chemo brain collide, you get a confused goat tangled up in a rope. That would be me.

It won’t come as a surprise — anxiety makes everything worse, and that holds true for chemo brain too. As mentioned above, I’ll discuss this in greater detail in a later post, but basically, a main focus of the MAAT class is learning to handle stressors in an effort to relieve anxiety.

So now that I know that what I’m experiencing is a real thing, a large part of combatting it is what I’m already trying to do — mindfulness, meditation, yoga and similar sensible self-care. And while it might seem aggravating that even with all that practice I’m still dealing with this, I’m actually bouyed by the fact that every bit of mindfulness helps. The reality is, I’ve made a monumental amount of progress from where I was when I started, five years ago.

And that keeps me going. Where would I be if I wasn’t trying?

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References:

Reader-friendly summary:
“‘Chemo brain’ is real, say UBC researchers”, UBC News, Apr 27, 2015, https://news.ubc.ca/2015/04/27/chemo-brain-is-real-say-ubc-researchers/

The published study:
Kam JWY, Brenner CA, Handy TC, Boyd LA, Liu-Ambrose T, Lim HJ, Hayden S, Campbell KL (2016) Sustained attention abnormalities in breast cancer survivors with cognitive deficits post chemotherapy: An electrophysiological study, Clinical Neurophysiology, 127, 369-378. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinph.2015.03.007
Please note that the above study is not available free online at this time. For a pdf free of charge, contact one of the authors (email address next to their name at link above) or your local university library. Due to copyright issues, I am unable to distribute the full document myself.

A Mini-Guide to Surviving Chemo Brain; or, “Wait, what were we talking about?”

While it’s not my intention to write advice columns for breast cancer patients, because I posted ‘getting through chemo‘ tips, I might as well follow up with what I’ve learned about handling the memory and focus issues associated with chemo brain.

Note, first, that chemo brain may not be all chemo. There may be various factors involved (chemo, tamoxifen, onset of menopause, even the tumor itself) and it’s difficult to tease out which one is the main culprit. Be that as it may, it still sucks when you’re standing in your closet, wondering why you went in there…for the tenth time today.

I put a lot of blame for this lack of focus and fleeting short-term memory on the estrogen-blocking drug tamoxifen, which is given to women with hormone receptor positive tumors. I can’t tell you how many physicians have assured me that it’s a “great drug” for decreasing risk of tumor recurrence. And an equally large number of women who have told me that their lives improved after they got off it.

Regardless, for now chemo brain is a fact of my life, so in the spirit of accepting what I cannot change, here are my best practices for making sure that chemo brain doesn’t get me fired from my job:

Write down your thoughts. And do it immediately. I’ve actually lost thoughts as I was scrounging for a writing utensil. If I have to remember something, I put it in writing, often on a sticky-note that goes on my computer monitor or bathroom mirror. Some place that I look at multiple times a day. I do this to excess, with notes everywhere, but it works. It also decreases my stress levels because I know the thought has been recorded.
If you can’t write it down, repetez! Repeat it in your head. Sounds obvious and overly simplistic? Perhaps, but you only need to do this until you either no longer need the thought, or get to a place where you can jot down a note. Of course, I ruined the last part of a meditation retreat for myself because a load of great post topics popped into my head and I had no place to record them. On the bright side, I realized I could juggle seven items in my head for a half hour if I concentrated on them!
Narrate what you’re doing. I’ve had to resort to this, especially when working on a multi-step process where accuracy counts. Yes, I’ve made mistakes on the “I-must-be-smoking-crack” scale, and this is often one of the best ways to avoid that. When I hear myself say what I’m supposed to be doing, I stay on task and am less likely to wander off.
Avoid distractions. This is probably the most critical piece of advice I can offer. Distractions are death to my thoughts because I go down rabbit holes before I’m even aware of what happened. The Google page of my Firefox browser at work suggests articles to read based on my browsing history, and let me tell ya, there are few feelings worse than suddenly realizing that you are lost deep in an article on body language when you should have been finishing up a report that’s due in a hour. How’d that happen? Anything that breaks my concentration — even a tickle of a distraction — can sidetrack me for minutes before I come to my senses.

Bottom line is, stay present. If there were one general rule of thumb to preserve your functioning while in the grips of chemo brain, that would be it.

The above hints may seem obvious, but I went through a lot of frustration until I accepted that my brain had changed and it couldn’t be ‘business as usual’ anymore. Once I started working around my limitations, things got a lot easier.

Catching Lost Thoughts

The glorious part of meditation is the opportunity to still my swirling thoughts and focus on breathing. At those times when my mind is still and the brain noise settles, my creative voice speaks most clearly.

This would be wonderful if not for the fact that, whether due to chemotherapy or my daily tamoxifen, my memory has been affected, rendering fleeting thoughts truly ephemeral. I can have a brilliant inspiration…and then *poof* it disappears. There is no guarantee that it will circle back around, and if it does, it may take a long while.

I try not to focus on these thoughts while meditating, but unlike other people who may easily remember their ideas once the session is over, I will not. This is problematic, as there are things that I must recall (like relaying important information or completing a task that I’d forgotten).

I can still seeeee yoooooou, little fly…

This can be distressing. In an unconscious effort to not forget, I find myself gently rolling the thought around in the back of my head during the session. I become like a spider, with the thought being a fly that I’ve caught. As I sit, I spin silk around my prize, gently holding it with spindly legs, trying to keep the thought away and yet not forget about it. Breathing is my focus, but that little fly is in my periphery and I keep glancing at it.

Obviously, this still interferes with my meditation. I don’t want to let my morsel go, and yet keeping it in sight is disruptive. I hold on too tightly.

So I have decided that given my current situation, I will make the best of it. If a critically important thought comes up, I will honor it and stop the meditation briefly…and write it down. This way it is secure and I can release the stress of possibly forgetting what it is and go back to meditating fully. In the event that my “great ideas” keep coming, perhaps that’s an indication that completely releasing focus on my thoughts is not the best idea at that time. And I honor that, too. This way, my meditation sessions remain about being in the present rather than losing parts of my future.

I’ve accepted that flexibility is necessary to respect both my individual needs and my meditation practice.

Invisible Effects: Helplessness

Suffice it to say, simply having cancer can leave you feeling helpless. Ignorance of the cause, uncertainty about the future, fear of treatment effects — that lack of control is frightening. But that’s not the helplessness that I’m writing about here.

In my last post on chemo brain, I alluded to the disorientation that comes from distractedness, brought on by lasting effects of chemotherapy on brain function. Here, I want to drill down and describe the feelings of helplessness that arise.

In WHY Did I Just Do That?, I wrote about a humorous dream in which I couldn’t understand the reasons for my weird behaviors. But the more sobering side of this is that I often feel that same way during my waking hours. There are things that I’ve done — treating a red light like a stop sign, as mentioned in my previous post — that make absolutely no sense to me and make me feel like I’m not in control of my own behaviors.

To make matters worse, I am not aware that I’m doing anything wrong (or dangerous or illegal!) at the time. When I realize what I’ve done, I’m horrified. Want to feel helpless? Not being able to trust yourself is a pretty good way.

I’ve been told that the main issue is loss of focus. Mindfulness helps immensely in these types of situations, but as anyone who has practiced mindfulness can tell you, you can’t be mindful 100% of the time. In my case, I’m fearful that this distractedness can put others or myself at risk.

Want a few more examples? Some are rather benign, like almost flooding the bathroom because I left the water running in the sink. Or writing an important email and leaving it unsent. Most of us have done something like that at one time or another, likely due to juggling too many tasks at once.

But the things that leave me feeling desperate are the ones that are not easily remedied. Having to learn things over and over again because I’m not retaining information. Having trouble expressing myself and not being able to retrieve words. After working as an editor at one point, this is unbelievably disheartening.

However, one event topped them all: I fell for a (well-designed, admittedly) bank scam where I gave out my Social Security Number despite having taken my work’s cybersecurity training course the previous week, and having received constant reminders from my bank that they will never ask for my SSN over the phone. Besides making me feel unimaginably STUPID, it cost me a good deal of money, time and nerves.

“Helpless” is not even the best word to describe how I feel. “Hopeless” is a more apt term. “Exposed” and “vulnerable” work too. This begs the question: how much more damage will I do to myself before things start improving? I should be working full-time instead of part-time, given the cost of living in my area. But how can I even think of looking for another job when I’m on such shaky ground? Cancer knocked me down in ways that I never anticipated. Yes, I’m grateful for being alive, but YEESH!

Building new neuronal connections, identifying what aspects of my memory issues are most severe, practicing mindfulness as much as humanly possible — it will take all that, along with a healthy dose of patience, to start seeing improvement. Hope I don’t get distracted and drive off a cliff before then.

Invisible Effects: Chemo Brain

Ah, chemo brain: the eater of thoughts. I should note that what I’m experiencing might not just be the effects of chemotherapy messing with my brain cells. This could also be influenced by the estradiol-blocking drug Tamoxifen that is forcing me into menopause before my natural time, or it could simply be the menopause “fog” that women complain about. So I don’t know exactly what it is, besides being infuriating.

I lose thoughts in an instant. Sometimes I actually “see” them disappear in the distance. It’s such a weirdly tangible sensation. I can try to grasp at their coattails and occasionally I’m successful in latching onto the thoughts and pulling them back. Other times I need to stop and walk back through my thought processes to retrieve them. And then sometimes they’re just gone. My desk at work is covered with post-it notes as a testament to what’s going on in my noggin. If there’s something I need to do I need to write it down NOW, and it’s not unusual for me to lose the thought as I’m in the process of getting something to write it down on!

This is what a walk down my memory lane looks like.

I can juggle up to three things in my mind at a time if I keep repeating them over and over again and work to maintain focus. Any more than that and it quickly crosses into the realm of hopelessness — it’s like knowing how to juggle three balls but if someone tosses a fourth at you, they all crash to the ground.

Then there are those chunks of awareness that disappear. It may simply be distraction and losing focus, but it feels like a hiccup in time that I don’t notice until it’s happened. It’s that “huh?” feeling as I return to present time when I realize that I’ve been gone for a second or two.

More disconcerting is a strange myopia that prevents me from reacting normally in a familiar situation. For instance, several months ago I treated a red light like a stop sign, and this was a familiar traffic light in my neighborhood that I’d been through many times. I briefly stopped at it, then drove through it. It was a “T” intersection that’s not terribly busy, but I did get shocked back to reality by the angry honk of a car that had the green and was probably wondering WTF I was doing.

The bottom line is that I’m distractable beyond belief. My train of thought gets derailed before it even leaves the station. The first time I noticed this, my oncologist ordered a brain MRI, way back in February. Nope, couldn’t blame it on a brain tumor — it’s just chemo brain.

This feels demoralizing, especially since my memory used to be so good. I lament losing all those awesome thoughts and ideas. And I know they were awesome because I remember having them — I just can’t recall exactly what they were. Yeah, there will be more, but I better have a notepad nearby to write them down. I even had a better ending for this post, but, you know…