Meet the authors…
Idelle Davidson Idelle Davidson is an award-winning health, medical, and general-interest journalist whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Time, Parents, Parenting, Los Angeles, Discoveries, Catalyst, InTouch, First For Women, American Way, UCLA Magazine, New Jersey Monthly, California Lawyer, Los Angeles Lawyer, and many other publications.
Two of her documentary scripts were produced for the Discovery Health Channel, and she is a former director of publications for the American Heart Association.
Idelle is a recipient of the Wellness Community-West Los Angeles' Pillar of Strength award for "Making a Difference in our Community."
And as a breast cancer survivor (diagnosed in 2005), Idelle knows what it’s like to experience memory problems post-treatment.
Excerpted from Your Brain After Chemo:
“Idelle’s Story, Have We Met?”I’m a little like Groucho Marx: He didn’t wish to belong to any club that would accept someone like him as a member. But one club won’t take my “no” for an answer. So here is what I tell it: “Do not call. Do not even whisper my name. GET ME THE HELL OUT!”
If you are reading this, then you or someone you care about may have been invited into this club, too. I never asked to join. None of us does. The post office clearly got the address wrong. I exercised. I ate organic foods. Heck, I’m a health writer! In fact, for three years I served as contributing editor to a cancer magazine. How’s that for irony?
But somehow, the dark force that controls these things dragged me into the club in July 2005, as I kicked and screamed, wanting to tear its eyes out. That’s when my gynecologist felt a lump in my right breast during a routine physical exam. A subsequent mammogram, ultrasound, MRI, and needle biopsy confirmed the worst: cancer.
My tumor was small. I opted for a lumpectomy. The bad news: although the cancer had not metastasized and was still early stage, it had spread to two lymph nodes under my arm. That, said my surgeon Nova Foster, a woman I am indebted to for life for her skill and compassion, would earn me six rounds of chemotherapy and seven weeks of radiation treatments.
For me, losing my hair because of chemotherapy wasn’t that traumatic. I had interviewed enough cancer patients to expect it. What terrified me then was sitting in that communal chemo room and watching the drugs flow through my vein like Drano. I tried to imagine the chemo as “good guys,” little Pac-men gobbling up all the evil cancer cells. But what was the chemo doing to my healthy cells?
I grew forgetful. As my friends in the cancer support group assured me, this was completely normal. Normal? Are you kidding? They’d exchange glances, chuckle and tell me I had chemo brain just like the rest of them. Indeed, their stories were hilarious in a member-of-the-club kind of way. One told of running in and out of her home six times, first forgetting her purse, then her grocery list, then other items. Finally, totally flustered, she made it to the car only to realize she had locked her keys in the house!
My friend Joyce, also a psychotherapist, is undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. One day when we were having lunch, Joyce confided she had written out a check and placed it in an envelope, planning to mail it later. When she went to seal the envelope, she noticed two checks inside to the same person. She had written a duplicate, one after the other, and hadn’t remembered.
My first experience with chemo brain happened midway through chemotherapy. I was shopping at the Century City mall, a few miles from UCLA. It was almost dark and I needed to get home…
See the full text of “Idelle’s Story,” in Your Brain After Chemo.
Dan Silverman Dan Silverman, MD, PhD is head of the Neuronuclear Imaging section in the Ahmanson Biological Imaging Division and associate professor of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA. He is also the principal investigator of a national trial looking at the utility of brain imaging for patients experiencing mild decline in their cognitive abilities.
From the foreword of Your Brain After Chemo:
Perhaps you picked up this book because you recently were diagnosed with cancer, or with a new stage of cancer and you and your doctors are contemplating various chemotherapy regimens as part of your upcoming therapy. If so, this book will provide state-of-the art knowledge to empower you, to be as informed as possible when making decisions that may affect the well-being of your body and mind for a very long time to come.
Perhaps you've already had cancer and chemotherapy, and you find it's taking all your concentration just to make it through this paragraph, something that never would have happened prior to chemo. On the other hand, perhaps making it this far has not been particularly difficult, but you're still not mentally functioning at the high level you were before chemotherapy. In either case, if you're eager to learn what can be done to get your brain working better faster, you’ve come to the right place.
Why this particular book? Well, in part because of the combination of Idelle's experiences both as a medical journalist as well as a cancer (and chemo) survivor. Her background is ideally suited for articulating the challenges that she and hundreds of other patients with whom she has communicated have faced and, in many cases, overcome.
Also in part because it conveys what I have discovered both as a doctor seeing thousands of patients with cancer and neurologic problems, as well as a physician-scientist who has been conducting research for many years aimed at decreasing chemotherapy-related problems. Within that work, my colleagues and I continue to capture images revealing areas of diminished metabolism in the brain tissue of patients suffering from cognitive difficulties, as much as five to ten years after their last dose of chemotherapy. These brain abnormalities correspond to their decreased ability to get through the words on a page, accurately recall paragraphs or pictures they looked at one half- hour before, or even to simply feel clear-minded. In other words, we can literally see and measure in these brain images biological changes that our patients experience as "chemo brain" or "chemo fog."
Finally, this book is not just a source of the best biomedical information available on the subject, but is also a straightforward and evidence-based "how-to" manual for people facing the prospect or the reality of a decline in thinking abilities after cancer and chemotherapy. In essence, it has been written to help people reclaim not only the health of their bodies, but also the whole of who they really are.
—Dan Silverman, MD, PhD.
