Wednesday 14 January 2015
Big surprise after the first day of chemotherapy at Roswell Park Cancer Institute – no nausea. Instead, fuzzy brain and an overwhelming desire to just go to sleep, plus many, many desires to take what the Car Talk guys call “an urgent haircut.”
“This is the miracle drug for nausea,” Nurse Kim said as she hooked a bag of it into the IV drip prior to administering the first chemo drug, Cisplatin, during the third hour of this seven-hour day at Roswell Park. And, after a strange tingling all over my head and a stranger tingling all through my groin area, it has been. A couple anti-nausea steroid pills later at home and still no complaints.
As for “haircuts,” I got good at maneuvering the IV apparatus from the treatment room to the wash room. Practiced at least nine times in the final hour, during the drip of other chemo drug, Gemcitabine. With Cisplatin, you’re supposed to hydrate heavily to counteract what it might do to the kidneys, so I was sipping water all day. Kept me from nodding off (as my medical proxy, Bill, did). Instead, I read the same paragraph in the New Yorker over and over.
Biggest hassle – veins. The phlebotomist tried one on my right arm and hit something that felt like an electric shock. I jumped. “I’ve never had that before,” she said as she searched for another entry point on my hand. Same problem with the IV, which wound up in my left hand.
So when everybody says you don’t know what to expect from chemo, it’s apparently true. What they’re saying now is that I’ll feel worse on Day 8, when I go back for more Gemcitabine and the Cisplatin has done most of its work at killing cells, than I do on Day 1. Guess we’ll just have to take it a day at a time.
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