Some Truths

Now that the last BIG chemo is over, I feel like I can look back and make a decent report on how it went.

First of all, I guess I should say it wasn’t as horrible as I’d anticipated when I thought about CHEMO before it started. I mean, it wasn’t a dance in the rain but there was no puke and very little diarrhea, so there’s that.

But it wasn’t easy.

The first day of chemo is always the easiest. I mean, sitting there with a needle in your chest isn’t fun but there are no feelings of illness or nausea. No, that comes a couple of days later.

The day after chemo isn’t bad. It’s not necessarily good but mostly I just felt like I was coming down with something. Which I guess I sort of was, namely, the Chemo Aches.

I did wake up sweaty the night after chemo and that was always gross.

By the third day after chemo, though, life is hard. I ached from top to bottom. My very skin ached. I mostly just needed to be left alone to sleep. Nothing else helped.

The fourth day, ugh. The intestinal issues kicked in. It wasn’t so much diarrhea, though, which is what I feared. Stop reading here if you don’t want to read about poop talk. It’s okay. Really. But I’m all about being truthful about what this chemo trip has been like.

So yes, on the Fourth day after chemo (Saturdays for me) I would wake up and NOT have my usual morning poop. When I’m not having poison pumped into my very veins, I am a VERY regular pooper. But come the Saturday after chemo and my scheduled is MESSED UP. And I feel terrible all day until I finally do poop, which often took several tries and much straining on the stupid toilet. And stupid me, I never just stayed home and waited it out. No, I took the girls to town, had lunch, went to Walmart to buy groceries. So I found myself in the bathroom at Walmart on several Saturdays after chemo, straining to poop, wishing I could JUST poop because I would feel SO MUCH better once I’d pooped just once. It was as if that first poop on those Saturdays was stopping up the entire system and once it was out of the way, things were on their way to being back to normal. Not quite normal yet but on the way.

We are now over a week out from chemo and things are better. I have more energy. I feel pretty good.

But there are still remnants from chemo.

For one, my pee smells horrible. I figure this is just my bodies way of eliminated the poison of chemo and so of course it stinks. It’s just nasty.

I have a weird taste in my mouth still. Not metallic so much as just yuck. Gum helps and I drink a lot of water, which leads to more stinky pee.

My skin is dry but not extraordinarily dry. I mean, it could just be that it’s winter in the Midwest more so than having anything to do with chemo.

So that’s it. That my report on how chemo went for me. At least how the first four chemo infusions went, which were a combination of Adriamycin and Cytoxan. I was also given Neulasta, a weird patch thingy that injects medicine into your arm 24 hours after a chemotherapy infusion. It’s supposed to boost my immune system. I think it also made me feel a little crappy. But who really knows?

Next up…weekly chemo infusions in which the medicine is Taxol. I’ve been assured by all the of the chemo nurses I’ve encountered so far that taxol is not nearly as physically hard on a body at the Adriamycin and Cytoxan cocktail I’ve endured the past nine weeks.

We’ll see and you can rest assured I’ll be here to report on it as we make our way through the next twelve weeks.