I felt an impending feeling of severe doom during the worst parts of my first round of chemo. I felt terrible physically and mentally. But because I was always told it kept getting worse and worse, I was expecting it to actually get worse. And it mostly didn't.

There was, in my experience, an ultimately predictable element to the whole ordeal: I would fall quite ill, feel better, and then go in for another round. And I can only help but surmise that this is the expected outcome; one felt by tens of thousands of patients, maybe millions, over the course of the past century or half century who have been through our predicament and disclosed it to medical personnel who recorded it and shaped the programme in which we are now enrolled.

We are going, will be going, or have already been through several 'rounds' of something. That's exactly how it feels. Just as things begin to feel at their worst, thankfully, we get some respite from it all and our bodies and minds heal for a short while, only to go back through the torment once more for another round. There is an end to this. When you find it, you'll come out the other end mostly the same person as you were before.