Anatomy of a chemo week

It’s a chemo week. What does that mean? I’ll tell you:

Day 1: Infusion Center. I spend a lot of this day at the infusion center, which is a pretty big space with about 12 chairs and a couple of beds in smaller rooms. There’s a bank of cubicles in the middle of the floor plan, where the nurses sit. There’s usually about five nurses, plus a nurse practitioner, plus several medical assistants. It’s BUSY in there. This particular center is focused primarily on gastro-intestinal and colon cancers.

Most of the time, my day looks like this. Check in at infusion center. Wait. Get called in for vitals — my weight (which is perpetually going down these days, despite my best efforts to maintain it), my blood pressure, and my temperature. Wait. Get called in for my blood draw. This is where they access my port (I’m a cyborg now and have a port placed in my right upper chest. This is what they use instead of an IV to take blood and to deliver the chemo.) to pull blood for my blood tests. Then I wait for the results to come back. If anything is off with the numbers, it could mean no chemo that week.

Then I often have an appointment one floor up with either my oncologist or her nurse practitioner. They’re both really great at taking time for me and answering all of our questions.

Then back downstairs to the infusion center where I wait for a chair to get my chemo treatment. It’s about a five-hour process at the end of which they connect me to a small pump that holds one last chemo drug. I’ll carry the pump with me for the next 48 hours and I’ll hate every minute of it.

Day 2: Rest. Usually on this day I’m extremely tired. My face turns a bright shade of red around now, which lasts for the next few days. Overnight I usually sweat quite a bit, but I’ve yet to be running a fever. In fact, my temperature at this point is often low. Other side effects include cold sensitivity; numbness in my feet, tongue, and lips; cramping in my calves and feet; lots of nosebleeds. Plus, carrying the pump increases my anxiety levels. What if something should happen while I have this pump attached? What if, what if, what if. Not to mention that it’s annoying to carry around. It’s in a little blue bag and taped up against my torso. I can’t bathe while it’s on, and the tape they use is itchy, I’m guessing because I’m sweating and, well, it just is.

I try to take it super easy on this day. I get acupuncture in the afternoon usually, and the one-mile walk there and back is typically more than enough activity. I find day two to be extra challenging mentally, mostly because I feel very compromised in terms of how I’m feeling, but somehow it feels like I should be up for more. Ten chemo cycles in, though, and I realize that no … doing the laundry on day two isn’t going to happen. It’s too much.

Day 3: Pump Disconnection. We take my rosy cheeks back to the infusion center for them to disconnect that pump I’ve been carrying around for 48 hours. At the same time, I get a liter of hydration, to help counter the toxifying effects of the chemo. They also give me a steroid and a shot of Neulasta, which is what keeps my white blood cells at the right level. I usually get nauseated as part of disconnection, which I think is psychosomatic because there’s nothing new entering my system that day, at least not chemo-wise.

Days 4 to 7: Rest. For the remainder of the week, I’m mostly battling fatigue and some nausea. I rest a lot and try to remind myself that my body is really busy fighting cancer. I continue taking the herbs that are part of my acupuncture protocol. And I go to acupuncture twice a week to help the chemo along and, when the time is right, to help detoxify.

The effects of chemo are cumulative, so as I progress in the treatments, I’m seeing not only more side effects, but also more fatigue — and for longer. I’m ten cycles in right now, which is a lot. I go for chemo every other Thursday. Soon, somewhere around round twelve, they’ll switch me from this aggressive treatment plan to a maintenance protocol that will be a lot easier on me. It’ll be one drug every three weeks, instead of a cocktail of chemo every other week. I’m told the side effects will be some fatigue on the day of and runny nose — but I’m hopeful that bloody noses will no longer be part of the equation. So, existing side effects, but fewer. I’ll take it.