Treatment Road

My trip down treatment road started on Friday the 19th of June. That was the day when I went in to receive my first round of chemotherapy.

This road, created by my doctors, is 22 weeks long. The 22 weeks are broken in two by a two week break between all treatments. These two weeks count as two of the 22 weeks of treatment so I'm really only facing 20 weeks of chemotherapy, ten weeks before the break and ten weeks after. During the first ten weeks I must go to the hospital once every three weeks, starting on the first day of the first week, to receive three chemotherapy drugs at the same time. I must do this four times in all during the first ten weeks. During the second ten weeks I must do the same basic thing four times except that I will only be taking two drugs instead of three. The third drug is what cause the worst side-effects so I will be referring to it as "nasty C" because it's name starts with a C and I don't know nor care how to spell or pronounce it.

Besides my trips to the hospital for drugs, during these two periods of ten weeks I am also receiving a dose of Vincristine once a week at home as well. During the second ten weeks I will also be receiving radiation therapy due to the fact that my cancer ended up spreading to some of my lymph nodes. This will be every day for the first four and a half weeks of the second ten weeks. After the second ten weeks are over I will have completed my journey down my road of treatments.

The first week of that road was not easy. I went into chemotherapy on Friday in a state of complacency. Although I knew that this was supposed to make me nauseous and all I was still complacent because I had also heard a whole lot of good stuff about the great anti-nausea drugs they gave you at the hospital. I was rudely awakened from my complacency by strong, painful nausea. The drugs did not work as good as I thought they would and needless to say I vomited three times during my eighteen hour stay at the hospital. The reason I had to stay for eighteen hours was that the "nasty C" had to be thoroughly washed out of me by hours worth of fluids given to me via a port that had been installed in me the week before. This is necessary because "nasty C" is bad for your kidneys so they want to make sure it goes through you as fast as possible.

But "nasty C" obviously does its share of damage while it's in you because for days after I left the hospital I was still feeling the effects of "nasty C". For days I experienced waves of nausea and my apatite was very low. Drugs they gave me for home provided some alleviation but even when I wasn't nauseous I still had this general feeling of fatigue most of the time. Of course, there was that one drug in which got rid of my nausea, gave me back a little apatite and made me feel very happy. But I didn't take this one often because I always thought I was finally getting better and I could ween off the drugs. I also refrained from taking it a lot because a nurse warned that it was addicting. I could tell, for it really seemed to give me unnatural happiness. At this moment however I'm not so sure. I'm starting to wonder if I've stumbled upon a drug, or a class of drug, that could actually make me the happy, outgoing person I was meant to be. I'll explain what I mean by that another time perhaps. Now I would just like to finish by saying that I'm pretty sure that the effects of "nasty C" are finally fading away and I should be fine until my next dose of "nasty C" two weeks from now. As for the Vincristine I'll be taking once a week until then, I'm not too worried about it. The side-effects of Vincristine aren't that bad so I don't think that the next two weeks will be too bad. Only time will tell for sure.