Chemo does a number on your brain. Yes, chemo brain, like pregnancy brain, is real.

But I can’t say I didn’t know better than to get involved with drugs in the first place. Dad used to give my sister and me the “drug talks.”

You know how bad they were…

or how many good people he knew got involved with them…

and they lost their families, jobs, homes…

and most likely, they even died.

Coincidentally these talks took place over dinner when most other families were getting their starving-people-in-the-world conversations. Oh, every nighttime meal didn’t have to end in drugs.

So we were well prepared when the egg on drugs public service announcement (PSA) came about. We figured Dad had paid for it, or more likely, he’d convinced them of the importance of such a campaign.

Those talks and that PSA, as serious as they were, led us to a lifetime of laughs (and after that video hopefully some new ones).

But now, I’m on drugs, Dad. I hate to break it to you.

After all those fair warnings, I’m detoxing from my second round, anyway. Feeling fried and in a fog, I know full well, drugs aren’t all their cracked up to be. And now chemo brain’s hit me real good.

Chemo brain is on, and as horrible as I thought it’d be to lose my brain to drugs, I failed to see the bright side: it’s not all gone.

There are those humorous moments for my family to enjoy and laugh about in days to come.

Instead of, “remember Dad’s drug talks?” It’ll be “remember Mom’s chemo brain?”

For instance, I woke up the day after chemo pondering do I have chemo today or was it yesterday?

I went food shopping and bought Skylar her favorite food–something she had eaten a year ago.

Then I asked what date it was because we had to make sure we bought a gift for an October birthday. It’s November in case you have chemo brain, too.

And I walked around the house in a daze for weeks because I misplaced my favorite dancing queen beanie–a special gift from my friends. I must have thrown it out. Alex found it in my closet (along with all my other beanies).

My brain’s fried, what can I say? It’s the drugs.

So I played my mind game Elevate to see just how bad things were. I failed the math portion seven times. I could always pass math, if not the first try; definitely, I could concentrate harder and win the second game.

My chemo brain was worse than I thought. What’s a mama who’s always dependent on logic to do?

But I’d been mindlessly playing this color sorting game where you group the same colored balls into jars—I could make sense of that. But why? Maybe it had to do with the patterns. It was the only explanation I could come up with.

You got to take this leap with me, here. So I stopped looking at the calculations as numbers that needed to be added and I thought of them instead as patterns. I tried it again.

I won, and I didn’t have to add a number!

When the girls suggested we play Clue, I fell back into my logical brain. I took detailed notes the way I always had. But when I tried to read them, it was like they were a foreign language. They just stared at me, mocking me. You can’t rely on logic the way you used to.

So I reminded myself to look at the patterns of all the scribbling instead. A different switch went on in my brain. I didn’t need logic, after all.

I won that game, too!

So I switched how I look at time–now it’s just attached to a routine that gets played out at a particular part of the day.

If someone changes an appointment, no problem. That’s just a break in the pattern. It’s always 12:30 on Thursday, but today it’s 11:30.

And if I have to plan something? There’s always Alex. Just like he’s there for this blog, (and Skylar, too) I can do the wordplay, associations, and similes, fall into the pattern of how I wrote my posts in the past, but I can’t for the life of me do the final edit. It’s like writing drunk.

As much fun as I’ve had frolicking about my right brain, letting patterns and routines keep me sane, I’ve been just as amused finding patterns to break–disconnections.

Patterns give new meaning and great humor to chemo brain. Alex pointed out another new habit of mine that he’s enjoying. Every morning I take off my silk sleeping cap and count how many hairs fell out during the night.

Yes, some people count sheep to go to sleep while I count hairs before I wake.

But it’s soothing to see how my hair falls out, just like the leaves. They don’t fall all at once. It’s a process. And with a process, there’s always a…pattern.

Sometimes the same number of hairs will fall out for a week at a time. So it’s easy for me to remember. It started with 0, then 3, 17, 24, 40, gulp, but now it’s back down to 20 again.

The numbers are going down! (Not to Coronavirus, unfortunately, but one day).

Studying the patterns bring order to something as chaotic as losing my hair. It helps me find the rhyme even when I don’t have the reason.

Ok. I admit it. I’m officially cracked up over this pattern thing.

No matter how you cook it, I’m gonna find a way to keep cracking up with my chemo brain.

Though I had my due warning not to get involved with drugs in the first place, while chemo’s here, I might as well make nice with it and have some fun.