Chemo Round 1: Day 1

Yes, I am tracking rounds and days. I like tracking things. This is why I had a great excuse to buy some fountain-pen-friendly notebooks and soft leather covers that I just NEEDED for tracking symptoms. 😉

Anything that helps me track is probably a good idea. I do have multiple ways so that I can track them on-the-go.

Symptoms

Slept pretty well, woke up feeling pretty normal. Coffee wasn’t as delicious as expected. Water is really what my mouth seems to crave. I did rinse once with that dry-mouth rinse. Not sure if it helped or not. Drinking lots of water seems to alleviate that, at least for now.

My cheeks get flushed pretty often – no fever, though. It does feel a bit like pregnancy where’s about 30 seconds before I go from hungry to starving – then you start to feel queasy, upset stomach. So, that means I can never leave the house without snacks. Or a backup water bottle. Lord. Those last 20 minutes home from the airport hurt a bit. I get a little woozy, too, standing up too quickly.

The other problems are on a different plane: nerves. My heart rate elevates once I experience symptoms. It also starts my jaw clench and then the headaches. I see the palliative care doctor at the beginning of October to hopefully help with that particular pain. It doesn’t come from chemo, it’s all stress, and this is stressful. So having a helping hand there could be beneficial.

I do feel a little neuropathy? Maybe. Little tingling. Nothing major and doesn’t bother me too much if I remember to move around. It’s really my left side that’s feeling it.

The Shot

So maybe getting the shot on a Saturday and thus at the hospital was a bad idea.

I have to go to the infusion ward to get it. It’s not as nice as the facility where I get my infusions (just right across the street!). It took probably 20 minutes of waiting for the shot to get walked up.

In the meantime, a poor guy in a wheelchair gets into the room right across from us. He announced to the nurse he’d just thrown up. I am TERRIBLE with throwing up of any kind. Meantime, the nurse is just going on about his treatment in sort of a HIPAA violation kinda way. The poor guy keeps coughing and B and I are waiting to close our eyes and ears and try not to make a big deal about it. Why is this nurse not shutting the door!

Besides the throwing-up phobia, what’s really hard about cancer is the possibility. It can kill you. It ravages your body. It’s really hard to see it. The treatment is more pain and suffering without any guarantee of the outcome. This poor guy was wheeled in and had a cane. You could tell it wasn’t a good day for him.

Sitting in the radiation ward at Mayo waiting for a consult. There were bald-headed kids with their moms (yeah, moms). Now that’s something I’ll never get used to. Kids in a cancer ward.

So yeah – a lot of it is in your head. Fight or flight. And I think you know what I’m here to do.

The really fucking good news

Not sure that I’ve explicitly noted how big this tumor is. It’s almost 8cm (yes, cm) large. My tumor is right behind my nipple, so while my nipple stays in the same place, the tumor grew up around it.

I looked at it when I changed this afternoon and the nipple almost looks NORMAL. This shrink was validated by a third party. ? This is exactly what I was hoping for – visible progress. I just didn’t expect that it’d be the next day.

I can feel some twinges in there – same thing happened when it was growing. Not painful, just strange.

Kind of unbelievable.