This Is Your Brain On Chemo

John Derbyshire is currently undergoing chemotherapy:

The base state for a chemotherapy patient, at least for this one, is listless apathy. Everything seems to move at half-speed. Tasks I could accomplish in a couple of hours now take all morning. This isn’t particularly unpleasant, just income-diminishing for a freelancer on piecework.

There is also the phenomenon of “chemo brain.” It strikes different people different ways. The way it strikes me is that nothing’s interesting anymore. Part of my editorial duties is trawling through news sources looking for interesting items. With chemo brain, there aren’t any. Nothing’s interesting. My kids aren’t interesting. My neighbors aren’t interesting. The movie we rented from Netflix isn’t interesting. My opera CDs aren’t interesting….

Not unlike depression – or the effect of having to analyze this GOP primary race for months. But my best wishes to the Derb, and hopes that it comes out fine.