Chemo brain: what helped one survivor think clearly again

Walk into a room and forget why you came. Lose a word mid-sentence. Read a page and keep nothing. If cancer treatment left your thinking foggy, you are not imagining it, and you are not alone. I know, because it happened to me, and it is the reason my book exists.

My name is T.J. Hornibrook. I am a survivor of CLL (chronic lymphocytic leukemia). While I was facing cancer, I noticed my memory slipping in ways that frightened me more than I expected: threads of conversation dropped, simple things evaporated, and concentrating felt like wading. Doctors and fellow patients have a plain name for this cluster of fog, forgetfulness, and slowed thinking that can come with cancer and its treatment: chemo brain.

I am an author, not a doctor, and this page is not medical advice; if thinking changes worry you, your care team should hear about it. What I can offer is what I did. I went looking for the science of how memory actually works, and I turned what I found into a system I could use on my worst days. That research became The Power of Memory. These are the strategies that helped most.

1. Stop fighting the fog head-on: one thing at a time

Chemo brain and multitasking are natural enemies. Memory begins with attention, and foggy attention leaks. The single biggest relief for me was shrinking the target: one task, one window of time, phone somewhere else. Short, focused efforts beat long foggy ones, and finishing one thing properly felt like proof my brain still worked.

2. Let paper remember what your head shouldn’t have to

A lesson from the book that matters even more here: not everything deserves your memory. Appointments go on the calendar. Instructions get written down the moment they are given, not trusted to a foggy later. Lists live where you will see them. This is not surrender; it is strategy. Every detail you offload is attention freed for the moments that count.

3. Test yourself gently, instead of rereading

When I read something I needed to keep, I stopped rereading it and started quizzing myself: close the page, try to say it back, then check. Trying to recall, even imperfectly, builds the memory far better than another passive pass. On bad days the recall is ragged. It still works better than rereading, and the small wins add up.

4. Protect sleep like it’s part of the treatment

Sleep is when the brain stabilizes and reorganizes the day’s learning, and cancer already makes sleep hard enough. Guarding a regular night (same hours, screens down, no heroic late nights) did more for my next-day clarity than any supplement aisle ever promised. Tired attention leaks; rested attention holds.

5. Arrive with a question: the PIC Protocol

For appointments, articles, anything that mattered, I used the book’s PIC Protocol: Purpose (why am I reading or listening to this?), Interest (how does it connect to my life?), Curiosity (what one question do I want answered?). Arriving with a question turns a foggy half-hour into a search with a target, and targets are far easier to hit.

The fog taught me something the research confirmed: memory is not a talent you lose. It is a process you can support.

I cannot promise anyone a sharper mind, and my book does not either. What I can say honestly is that understanding how attention, encoding, sleep, and retrieval fit together gave me back a sense of control at a time when control was scarce. If chemo brain has you feeling like a stranger in your own head, start with Chapter 1. It is free, it is short, and it was written by someone who needed it first.