Since I started chemotherapy, the nurses have been warning me about the potential for mouth sores. The warnings grew more urgent when I switched to Xeloda, as mouth sores seem to be third on Xeloda's side effect hit parade (after neuropathy and hand-foot syndrome). Until now I thought I'd dodged that particular bullet, but yesterday evening my luck ran out.
At first I was hoping it was just a twinge of sore throat or something psychosomatic, but no such luck. There's clearly a problem -- canker sore, cold sore, pimple, take your choice -- along the gum line of my back molars. But of course nothing's that simple. Now that I know it's there, my tongue has spent all day poking at it trying to figure out what's going on, and since your tongue isn't really designed to be poking around your back molars, it now hurts, too. And when your tongue starts poking around, your saliva glands start freaking out, and flooding your mouth with saliva. This means you're constantly swallowing, so soon you've got a sore throat to go with the mouth sore. Last but not least, it seems this is something of a cold sore on steroids as my teeth and jaw also hurt.
Not awesome at all -- especially as I'm now sixteen days from leaving for Vietnam and don't really want to be running around the jungles of southeast Asia trying to locate warm saltwater to use a rinse.
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