The first chemo treatment

This is how I look today, the first day I receive chemotherapy in my fight against cancer.

I didn't get much sleep last night. After class I made a quick stop at Woodman's for some groceries that will hopefully help over the next few days. I picked up several cartons of chicken stock, two bottles of gatorade, a bunch of frozen juices, and some yogurt. Based on what I've heard from Sarah (who is dealing with Hodgkin's now) and Rebecca (who kicked cancer's ass 12 years ago!) I'm going to want to stick to a liquid diet for a few days. I also knew that I would have a hard time falling asleep so I attempted to make myself exhausted by watching TV and staying awake as long as possible. I ended up heading to bed around 1:15am. Not the best when you have to be at the hospital at 8:00am dressed and showered. I'm assuming I got some sleep during the 5 hours until I had to get up and start getting ready, but it didn't feel like much. I remember thinking a lot during the night about everything, including about how much sleep I wasn't getting.

After a snooze or two, I got up this morning around 6:30am. We left the house for Froedtert at about 7:45am and of course ran into traffic on I-894. When you haven't had to get up fand go to work in months, you sort of forget about things like morning traffic. We probably would have only been about 10 minutes late for my appointment however we were given wrong directions inside the hospital. So my 8:00am appointment to have the port put in probably didn't get underway until at least 8:45am. A few nurses checked my vitals and put in an IV. I found out that I was going to be only lightly sedated - enough to make me calmer but not enough to put me to sleep. At first I was nervous about that, but after talking with the doctor, it made the most sense. I'm sure the dose of Ativan (anti-anxiety medicine) they gave me helped. They injected antibiotics through the IV to help prevent the risk of infection.

This is what the port that will go inside of me looks like.

Once inside the procedure room, I was awake the entire time, talking to the nurses, and was just overall comfortable. I was never groggy or out of it. I couldn't see what was going on, which I appreciated. Most of my chest and head was covered with a blue cloth. I could look to my left and see parts of the room or the occasional nurse or aide that was standing by. The only pain I felt during the procedure was from the needle used to numb the area and the actual lidocaine stung quite a bit. Pretty soon I was already being wheeled back to recovery. I had a newly implanted port near my right collar bone, just ready to get used and abused! They gave me my first meal of the day, a plain turkey sandwich and Sun Chips, and after about an hour, I was free to go.

We only had about 30 minutes before my chemotherapy appointment so we stopped for Maria to get a quick lunch at the 87th St Bistro inside the cancer center. I checked in at the Day Hospital on the 3rd floor of the cancer center. I expected that I would be more nervous than I was. I think that Ativan I was given earlier was really working.

Eventually my name was called and Maria and I were taken to a private room. The rooms have a small LCD TV hooked up to a DVD player, so we rented "Ghost Town" starring Ricky Gervais from Netflix to watch during the process. The nurse hooked the IV machine up to my newly installed port and away we went. First was anti-nausea medications and then the actual chemo drugs. I am getting a typical combination of four chemo drugs known as ABVD. The nurse injected a small dose of bleomycin (if I remember correctly) by hand to test for allergic reaction. Since I was OK, she could then give me the full dose. Three of the drugs were injected by hand by the nurse while the last, dacarbazine, is injected using a drip bag over a 30 minute period. The nurse seemed to enjoy the movie and wants to rent it herself now.

Once all the chemo drugs were dispensed, the nurse flushed my port, bandaged it up and sent us on our way. I am now at home, pretty much feeling OK. The main pain I feel is in my upper chest/neck area where the port was put in. It's pretty hard to turn my neck left or right or look up or down without feeling it. Hopefully that only lasts a few days. I'm still feeling the effects of the bone marrow biopsy from Monday, but it is improving each day.

So tonight and the next few days will be the hard ones. I'm prepared as best as I can to feel exhausted, sick, pain, whatever. I'm hoping I'm one of those fluke patients that don't get bad side-effects, but that's probably wishful thinking.