1 Chemo Down, 15 More to Go!

I’m not sure what I expected of chemo. The whole thing was fairly anticlimatic.

First I had an appointment with my oncologist who just did a quick examination. Then I was sent into the “infusion room”.

Infusion is just another name for IV chemo. Some chemotherapies are administered by pill, but none of the components of my cocktail come in oral form.

You choose where you sit, so my nurse put me sort of in the middle of everything and also right in sight of the nurse’s station in case I needed anything quickly.

A nurse came over and “accessed” my port, which I was absolutely not about to watch. It hurt a little more than a normal blood draw stick but it wasn’t unbearable. First they flush the port with heparin, an anti-clotting drug. Then they started pumping me up with fluids.

Before they administered the chemo, they gave me two “pre-meds”, a strong anti-nausea drug and a steroid, through the port. These drugs have the side effect of giving insomnia, which I unfortunately managed to get despite being exhausted.

Two of my drugs are pushes, which means that a nurse sits with me and slowly injects the drug into my IV. The other two are drips that each last about an hour. One of the drips can cause allergic reactions so I had a test dose and then had to wait an hour to make sure I didn’t have a reaction.

All in all, chemo lasted about 5 hours from when I sat down in the chair.

I felt pretty good the day after. I was a little out of it, but not sick. Today was a bit worse and I felt like I couldn’t get out of bed. If I was awake, it was only half awake. Even writing this feels really tiresome and my whole body is achy.

But at least I’m not vomiting. And killing cancer is hard work!

Hope everyone had a great weekend.