So Terry Gross is interviewing the doctor who wrote "Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies," subject of a Ken Burns documentary series on PBS next week, and he talks about how intense chemo treatments used to be and how many of the advances in recent years have been in palliative care, with better drugs to reduce the side effects like nausea.
I can attest to that. Nausea is what you're likely to get with Gemcitabine, my final chemo infusion on Wednesday, and part of the prep before they hook it up is an anti-nausea pill, Compazine. I've been continuing the Compazine at home, lest those occasional little volcanic burps erupt into a Kilauea. So far, so good.
What I have mostly is the fatigue. More than once Wednesday night I settled down in front of a "Seinfeld" episode and next thing I knew, there was another sitcom rerun on the channel. I finished that off with 10 hours in bed, soaking up sleep. Thursday and Friday, out and about as usual to bridge, to lunch, to work Thursday night, I still dozed off in front of computer screens, slow-moving bridge hands and long stop lights.
What else do I have? A fuzzy brain. Fuzzy vision, too. That zinging in my ears still crops up. Stuff still tastes funny. And then there are the sore veins, especially in my left hand, still swollen more than a month after that hand last got the Gemcitabine.
Can you blame me for having an attitude about where to stick the IV for my final infusion? Right arm only. That attitude ran smack into a nurse I hadn't had before, Connie, a black woman who's been at Roswell Park Cancer Institute 32 years.
Connie wasn't going to let me tell her what to do. She took her time sizing up my hide-and-seek veins, tied off my right arm above the elbow, had me flex my fingers a few times and then got out the alcohol swabs. Darned if she didn't nail it on the first try. She also got the doctor's permission for a simultaneous infusion of saline solution to keep the Gemcitabine from burning my veins. The fatigue started setting in halfway through the half-hour session.
And that's the end of chemo. Hallelujah! Better days are ahead. Next: A CAT scan April 8, followed by a consult with the surgeon, Dr. Guru, two days later.
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