First Day of Chemotherapy

I'm sure you have heard cancer stories before. Cancer is not easy. There's talk of how strong chemo is and how sometimes it can just wipe out a person. Having gone through radiation, I was expecting the same ordeal. A lot of sleeping was to be in my near future.

My first day of chemo began in the usual clinic. I come here for basically everything. Before taking the chemo, they have to make sure that my blood counts are all right. I don't see why. I had been told that chemo typically brings it down, so making sure they are up seems kind of redundant. (If I'm even using that word right.) Although, I'm not a doctor or know anything about the body, so I'm gonna put my trust in the people that should know what they're doing.

Once I was cleared, I was sent off to the main hospital. The fifth floor is where the patients of my clinic go to for anything and especially for chemos that required us to stay overnight in the hospital. I was wheeled into my room because I still have trouble with long distances and the main hospital is on the complete other side of the cancer institute. For this first one, I was brought in with my dad, since he drove me to my appointment. I got settled and they put me on my IV. Now, the reason why I was staying at the hospital was because the chemo I was taking was the first in its cycle. The beginning of each of my cycles begins with a chemo that last six hours through IV. The first chemo is always the roughest.

Chemotherapys have different side effects as do all medicine, but depending on the side effects determined how strong a chemo was. While taking radiation I took 4 weeks of a chemo called Vincristine at the same time. It's a quick chemo that only takes a minute to go through my IV. This chemo is not that strong, but the I did have one of the side effects, which is constipation. It fucking sucked. Like so much. I've never felt such stomach pain and pain in the stomach is the worst. At one point while I was in the hospital for it, I had to take morphine in order to handle the pain. But as long as you keep your colon in check then its a pretty harmless chemo.

The chemo I was preparing to take is not like that at all. Before taking it, I have to have an audiogram. A test that checks your hearing ability to determine where it is because this chemo can affect my hearing.Cisplatin, the chemo I was to take, can also messed up my kidneys with the amount of platinum it has. Another reason that I have to stay in the hospital is because it can give me delayed vomiting which is bad because the problem is that they could discharge me to my house, I end up vomiting, and I also end up dehydrating myself and go back to the hospital again.

Clearly I had cause for concern.

It didn't help that they had to hydrate me any time that I wasn't taking a medication or the chemo. Which is really annoying because it's a lot of peeing. The reason why this sucked was not the fact that I went every 20 minutes and could never get comfortable, no, it was the simple annoying fact that you have to bring the stupid IV pump with you since you were connected to it and those things are hard to navigate when you have no strength. I would always forget to plug it back it and it would set off an annoying alarm. This is only relaxed when I'm taking the chemo.

Since my mother had begun to work again, I had my father with me for this first time. I still can't really drive because I don't really have good peripherals so its safer for me to be driven around. Not that I would have gone to this thing alone. But maybe it was because I was with my mother 24/7 since the beginning of this, just the two of us, I started to wish that she could have not gone to work that day. I love my dad, but he's nothing like my mother, and when they came in that first time with the bag of Cisplatin, I really wish she was there.

This IV bag was not like the rest in the least. It's encased in a black covering they put chemical hazard signs placed on the bag, the door, and my IV pump so that everyone would know that I was taking Cisplatin. When the nurse connects it to your IV, they have to wear a blue covering on their clothes and put a small covering on you, in case it spills on either of us.

This was why I needed my mother. I turned towards my dad, scared. His eyes were a bit wide and he was closely watching the nurse. If my mother was there, she probably would have looked even more frightened and try to cheer me up. My father is a man of few words. I didn't and yet did want to see them connect me and the chemo. I have a morbid curiosity for things and this was something new. It turned out to not be as bad as I thought.

I didn't feel a thing. Nothing.

I was surprised. It felt like when I would just be hooked up with liquids. My mother came by after work, but that night I stayed alone at the hospital. I was wide awake. It was weird. I couldn't go to sleep. I didn't even sleep after the chemo ended at 2AM. I think I fell asleep at around 3:30AM. Hopefully. 

The next day the nurses kept asking me how I felt and making sure I drank water. I honestly felt fine. No need to throw up and no tiredness. These were good signs and my doctor discharged me that day. My only problem: the medicine that was proscribed to me. I have to take a drug called Neupogen which are injections that help push blood cells from my bone marrow, since they become low after chemo. This process hurts. I get a lot of muscle pain and I don't particularly like Neupogen. I'm not scared of needles, but this made me sick of them. I take this medicine for only 14 days after my first chemo, but it gets tiring getting stabbed every night.

This day marked the first before I can go back to a semi-normal life again.  Each week after, I just take Vincristine for two weeks and then I get a three week break before the next cycle begins. And so on, and so forth. Although there are 5 weeks that I do a different regimen.

In regimen B, I have to stay in the hospital for two nights for the first chemo. The chemo is only 4 hours long through IV, but I need hydration every 6 hours in between. Instead of two weeks of Vincristine,  I do only one with a two week break instead of three. Its not bad, actually pretty calm compared to regimen A. This was good for me because I had a plan.

Ever since I woke up from my surgeries I had been hoping and praying that I would be able to see my grandmother and brother, who live in Puerto Rico. Well the rest of my family lives there and I really wanted to see my family.

I had asked my doctor if I could go and visit. He gave me the go ahead as long as I took out a problematic tooth and had at least two weeks of break from my last chemo. This was easy to accomplish.

And accomplish them I did.