Week 4, Day 7 & Week 5, Day 1

Trepidation Tuesday. Whenever anybody asks how I feel, I tell them better than I'll feel for the next three weeks because the second round of chemo infusions is starting Wednesday. And since it's the first treatment in the series, it's going to involve both of the drugs.

It makes for a long, long day Wednesday at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, arriving before 11 a.m. for a blood test, leaving a few minutes after 7 p.m. The blood test looks good -- the red cells have bounced back. Everything is proceeding normally. The chemo doc gives me a date in early April for a CAT scan when all the treatments are finished. He says the surgery then will be scheduled in late April or early May.

Only hitch in the day stems from health care proxy Bill Finkelstein snapping cell phone pictures of the health care aide listening to my chest with a stethoscope. She says nothing about it at the time, but a couple hours later we're summoned for what we think will be the start of the chemo infusions and wind up meeting instead with the chemo doc and a female hospital security officer, who say there's been a complaint and tell Bill to delete the photos from his phone. Something about the HIPPA patient privacy laws. They add that no photos should be taken at all in the hospital, lest a patient appear in one of them and have his or her privacy compromised.

The chemo infusion itself -- the Cisplatin for two hours, then half an hour of Gemcitabine -- goes into the back of my right hand and is far less painful than I imagined it would be. Congratulations to Doreen, the nurse, who said she was hitting all the veins on the first try today. Like the last time, I have to make many trips to the bathroom, wheeling the IV gear with me and having the alarm beeper start beeping while I'm in there. During the last couple hours, I also keep nodding off when I try to read. 

After fasting all day on water, tea and Roswell's little containers of apple juice, I'm ready for a full dinner when I get home -- soup homemade by one of my bridge partners, artisan bakery bread and gourmet blue cheese, and those fabulous ginger molasses cookies for dessert. And now, even though it isn't even 11 p.m., I can't keep my eyes open. Otherwise, aside from feeling a little spacey, it's almost like being normal.