raig daniels
The ongoing question.
The honest answer: I feel like shit.
My body never fully recovered from chemo, season one. Nine months post-chemo, I was *close* to normal—but I’d already been told full recovery can take up to five years.
I finished season two, episode three almost two weeks ago. Episode four starts tomorrow. And I’m dealing with systemic pain.
Primarily: shoulders, neck, clavicle, lower back, and my big left toe.
Season one chemo was **FOLFOX**. The “OX” is oxaliplatin—and it did not agree with me. Oxaliplatin caused neuropathy: acute cold-induced pain and numbness during and shortly after infusion. The effects were cumulative. Over time, the numbness never went away. Because of this, oxaliplatin was removed for the final two episodes of season one.
For season two, my oncologist switched me to **FOLFIRI**, specifically because of the severity of the neuropathy. FOLFIRI is *not* known to cause neuropathy.
Here’s where my own misunderstanding came in.
In my head, neuropathy meant numbness and cold sensitivity in my hands and feet. That’s how it presented for me—but neuropathy is more fundamental than that. It’s nerve damage. The poison damages nerves.
Season two chemo isn’t causing *new* neuropathy. But it **flares pain in every place I’ve injured over the past two years.
For me, that includes:
• My big left toe — nerve damage from oxaliplatin
• My achilles — from playing padel (classic middle-aged mistake: insufficient stretching)
• My clavicle — from a bodyboarding slam after episode two of season one
That clavicle never fully healed. Hard to recover when poison is injected into your body every two weeks.
What about the efficacy of the treatment?
This is the second-most asked question I get.The answer:
I don’t know yet.
I start episode four tomorrow. Each episode is bi-weekly. The plan is imaging after episode five.
That CT scan will tell us whether the cancer is responding—specifically whether tumor burden has decreased, remained stable, or progressed.
Until then, I’m focusing on nutrition and preserving muscle mass through gentle strength work and daily movement.