Tag Archives: chemo

It’s Been Quite a Year

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A little over a year ago I started chemotherapy. I haven’t talked about it much around here, but not because nothing happened. I just wasn’t ready yet.

Before the chemo even began, I resigned myself to losing my hair and decided to shave my head rather than leave it lying around all over the place as I shed. I left the beard for the moment. It wasn’t a bad look!

The only problem was that some of the worst people in these Unites States have coopted this look. Here I am the morning of the first chemo treatment, in the bathroom at the cancer center, rocking a special shirt with tearaway sleeves:

Not long after I took that selfie I sat in a comfortable chair, while the Official Sweetie of Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas wrapped my extremities in ice packs. This is me, while we waited for the pharmacist to dole out the drugs:

When the medicine arrived, the tech had to put on special single-use hazardous materials gear before touching it. That stuff is dangerous! God forbid it should get on anything before being injected directly into my blood.

I had already been admonished not to share a bathroom with anyone for a few days, for the same reason. I’m sure the city water treatment plants are well-prepared for stuff like this coming down the pipes. (That was sarcasm.)

The precursor drugs all tucked neatly into my bloodstream, the main event began. The tech hung the bag with the cancer-killer goo, pushed some buttons on the transfusion machine, and made sure we knew where the call button was. We were left alone, to watch the drip.

Only it wasn’t very long I started to feel a little tightness in my chest. “I feel tight in the chest,” I said, “Can you…?” was as far as I got before Official Sweetie was pushing the call button. I felt my head taken by a wave of heat. We were right by the nurse station, and they glanced up and suddenly there was a lot of activity around me.

I was red. Alas fair reader, there is no photographic record of my redness; it was not the time for snapping pics. I have since been compared to the classic Kitchenaid red. If you don’t spend time around quality appliances, that is a very deep red.

I was very quickly surrounded by people. The drip was stopped, and the administration of antihistamines began. I’m a little vague on the details of this period. I did not see the tool box set up behind me with a variety of tools for resuscitating critically ill people, but Official Sweetie did.

While a nurse engaged in conversation with me, which was both pleasant and obviously to measure my mental state, more vitals were taken, my heart was listened to and my lungs were evaluated, and eventually the medical professionals around me decided it was ok to start the drip again, but really slowly. My chair would not be ready for the next patient for a while.

The drip had not been going very long when I reacted again, though not as strongly. MY vote was to try again another day with a different medicine, but my vote was worth exactly zero. One way or another, they were going to get that goo inside me.

Each attempt to put the drug in a person is called a “challenge.” Out of curiosity I asked how many times they would try to give me the meds before they gave up. The answer was technically four, but it sounded like the last challenge would go on a week if it had to.

More intravenous Benadryl, a slower drip yet, and on the third try I didn’t react. Eventually they increased the flow to merely slow, and three hours later than planned we were done.

The chemo medicine takes a while to make you truly miserable, so I drove us home. The megadose of Benadryl did not make me even slightly drowsy. I seem to have a special relationship with that drug. In fact, I’m convinced that I’m a little bit allergic to it, but I won’t bother you with my analysis here.

Home. We got there, and I felt all right, but Official Sweetie and I both knew rough times were coming. But those rough times are different for everyone, which makes preparation more difficult.

Maybe sometime soon I will talk about that. It’s been a year, after all.

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Today I got the answer, which was… no answer

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I have some stories from the last few months of chemotherapy. I intend to tell them here someday. Maybe even soon. That first day I learned what “Red Man Syndrome” is. It’s pretty rare, apparently. I have marks on my skin, slowly fading, that are echoes of the burns inflicted on my veins. I have thoughts, now, about hospital food.

But today was, I thought, the beginning of the next chapter. I sat down with my oncologist to discuss life after chemo. I expected he would schedule another scan to measure the success of the drugs, as well as a shift in regimen to fit my current circumstances. Instead what I got was much less… page-turny.

There is one number I live and die by, and that’s PSA. That number is very low now, and apparently as long as it stays low, I’m just coasting. I will never not have cancer. Remission is not to be hoped for. But if that one number stays low, then I may have a chance to die from something else instead, preferably a long time from now.

I was expecting today to hear “Here’s our plan of action!” and instead I heard, “there will be no action for the foreseeable future.” That’s actually a GOOD THING (I keep telling myself). Much better than “shit, I guess we better try something else.” On the other hand, the fact that there will be no full-body scan recognizes that even though we know there is cancer all over the place, exactly where doesn’t matter. That information is not actionable.

The number, PSA, will be measured every month for at least the next year, when I go in for my bone-strengthening goo (the goo slows the spread of cancer in the bones, as well as shoring up damage from the chemo). After that, the measurement might be quarterly.

It’s going to be very difficult for me to not obsess over the number (the measurement on the blood sample taken this morning STILL ISN’T IN YET), but perhaps it will be even harder for the Official Sweetie of Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas. The number will be good until it isn’t, and we can drive ourselves crazy anticipating that ominous measurement, or we can just get used to the fact I have cancer and always will. The barbarians are in the forest, and it is only a matter of time until they rush the gate again. All we can do is watch closely and be prepared for when that happens.

The chemicals I ingest each day are getting nicknames: “Abbies” and whatnot. This is my life now, being gently awoken each morning by Official Sweetie to take my Abbies while my stomach is empty. Filling the pill planner each week (more about that later). Going to work like nothing ever happened. Maybe even writing again. Who knows?

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