Last Updated on April 10, 2025 by Tom Kane
With apologies to the Newcastle Supergroup Lindisfarne, but I couldn’t resist the play on words. The fog in question is best known to many as Chemo Brain, or Chemo Fog or even Cancer Fog. The official title seems to be PCCI or Post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment.
There are those who don’t believe it exists. Even some oncologists have cast doubt on its existence. I’m here to tell you it most certainly exists, but it has a weird way of manifesting itself sometimes.
Generally speaking, it’s my short term memory that is most affected. “Can you turn the immersion heater on, please,” my wife said to me yesterday, as I was getting up to make a coffee. I got up and even remembered I had to turn it on as I walked out of the bedroom door. By the time I reached the toilet, where the immersion switch was located, I had forgotten what my wife had asked. As our 100 year old stone Cyprus house is all on one level, it took all of 15 seconds to go from the bedroom to the toilet. And that was it, memory gone.
And yet, I can write a 100,000 word novel and hardly need to make any notes. My current works-in-progress, are Book 3 of The Midnight Series. I’m halfway through writing the first draft and have very few notes. My other book is The Ragged Edge of Time, a time travelling alternate-history novel. It’s at 80,000 words and I’m freely switching between these two novels, but I can’t remember to switch the immersion heater on. It’s the same with several other small jobs I was supposed to be doing. But a couple of 100,000 works of fiction, no problems.
And the weirdest thing of all? I finished my chemotherapy about two years ago and I’m still having problems. I’m told to expect problems like this, not to mention my balance when walking, to take about five years to get better.
Five years! That’s a long time to lose your memory… now, what was I writing about?
Copyright © Tom Kane February 2025
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