Chemo Treatments

The medicines they are giving me during the infusions are numerous, and I won’t list them out to save you the boredom. But I go through about 6 bags of drip stuff. Only 2 of them are the actual Chemo medicine. The rest are nausea stuff and sugar water. It takes about 2.5 hours to get it all down.

You get put in a kind of big open room with about 7 other people, but you are separated by these little glass sliding dividers from your left and right neighbors, but you do see across to the opposite line of people staring back at you. So it is kind of private, but not really. There is a nice comfy reclining chair to sit in during the infusion and a decent sized guest chair for a visitor.
So far Cindy has come with me for all the infusions.
We have a treatment cycle of 5 days on and 3 weeks off. So far I have not actually had to throw up. I have felt like it many times, and my stomach is starting to feel like the inside of it is covered with fire ant bites. I guess the cells in the stomach lining are dying off as expected. I am expected to experience the worst of the effects this weekend, when I reach maximum saturation.

As you can see from the picture I have preempted the hair falling out routine and went with the buzz cut. I have seen some patches thinning considerably already. I did this to avoid the shock of finding clumps of hair laying around and freaking me out. Also to deal with the hair thing emotionally all at one time was a better move I think.
I made it fun at least while I was cutting it. I first made my self a big Mohawk, then came back and cut that off.
The nurse that is taking care of my infusions is named Cheryl and seems to be real nice. She has been doing this for 31 years. There are DVD’s here they let you borrow if you have a DVD player. I bring my laptop each day and do work or play games, but I guess I will eventually watch some of their DVD’s on it. It is a nice little feature, it is all funded by donation, and the hospital does not pay for it. We get them for free, but people donate the DVD’s and the staff can check them out for $1 over the weekends and they use that money to buy new ones.
Over all it has been an uneventful first week, fatigue has been the biggest complaint. Today Cindy forced me to break out the wheelchair to go from the car to the hospital. She had fun pushing me. It was quite a moral setback for me to have to succumb to riding in it, but I guess it had to happen sooner or later. There are no shocks on it. I was just thinking if you have hemorrhoids and have to ride in one of these, you better get one of those air donut things.
So what terrors lie ahead for the weekend, who knows, it could be light. I have scheduled to be on vacation all next week given the unknown and I have Tondi coming to baby sit Sunday thru Tuesday and Mom coming Wednesday thru Saturday. Cindy will be in Colorado all week at a Cisco Training Bootcamp.
Maybe I will feel good enough to spend some time actually staining the deck on my vacation. Jeff and Gene will be coming with their associated wives and would probably love an activity to break up their boring days sitting with me.
Well, that is enough rambling for now.
Hope this give you an idea of the Chemo infusion process.
Love to all,
Greg