Chemo Sucks

I got a great card from the Scotts that said “Chemo Sucks – but if it sucks the cancer out of you, then YAY Chemo!”  While funny, it is also about as true as it gets.  This isn’t fun, BUT I can actually feel that my tumor is smaller.  So it is working.  YAY Chemo!!

There are a lot of misconceptions about chemo and what happens to you when you have it – there is also a lot of true yucky stuff too.  I have found that a lot of people are wondering about it – and some have been brave enough to ask, so I thought I would do a post to kind of walk you through a cycle of chemo.

The first thing you need to know is that chemo really impacts everyone differently.  Dr. Favret, the awesome oncologist, was very clear about that in our first meeting.  She also gave some really good advice “try to have a life in spite of it.”  I am definitely trying to take that advice.

The specific drugs you take and your own physical condition are a huge factor in what happens and how your body handles it.   Other than this stupid-ass-cancer, I don’t have any serious health problems and that is helping me a lot.   As I mentioned before, my combination of drugs is two “standard” chemo drugs that are used for lots of cancers – Taxotere and CarboPlatin, and Herceptin that is specific to my type of breast cancer.  Herceptin is cool because it has far fewer side-effects on your system – mostly that it makes your fingernails and nail beds really dry.  That is nothing compared to the other crap that chemo can do.  I get my treatments once every three weeks (as long as my blood count stays up), and I will have a total of six treatments.

The first treatment, they make you experience the whole treatment without much in the way of battling the symptoms other than nausea.  But in subsequent treatments, they let you take all kinds of stuff that make the symptoms better.  However, the two main helpful drugs I have are Dexamethasone and Prochlorperazine.  My friend Dex is a very strong steroid based pill that is taken the day before, the day of and the day after chemo, to keep the body from outright rejecting what they put in your system by making you barf your guts out.  I have not barfed one time yet and that is excellent.  The day of chemo, the nurse also gives me a dose of Dex in the chemo IV as added protection.  We like Dex.  Prochlorperazine is a supplemental drug that I can take if I start feeling nauseated during the rest of the treatment.  I just finished my third treatment (YAY half way done!) and I have only had to take it twice.

Chemo day itself is oddly not that big of a deal.  The only a problem is that it wears me out to have to do it.  I get anxious having to be off work for something that pisses me off, I worry about the friends that take me because it is a crap thing to have to do, and it just sucks to be trapped in a doctor office for a good share of the day.  We have also had a lot of trouble with Herbert the mediport functioning properly and while they get it working after a bit (and troubles with it aren’t unheard of) it adds a lot of time to the treatment – so it can go from 3 ½ hours to 6 hours pretty fast, especially if they have to put “medical draino” in it to get it working.  The odd thing is that the chemo drugs themselves don’t do a thing to you that day really.  It takes some time for them to work their way through the system.  The only thing I really feel from them the day of is COLD – and that is because the drugs are room temperature – which is lower than the body temperature.  Fortunately, it is easy to warm back up. 

The day after chemo is what Laurie calls “Harry Potter Shot Day.”  This is the Neulasta shot that makes my blood cells reproduce – that has its own side-effect – it makes your bones feel like they are growing.  This is kind of like when you had growing pains as a kid – only about 100 times worse.  I won’t kid you – it really sucks buckets.  I eat Tylenol like they are candy during the day, and at night when it is really bad, I take a Vicodin to deal with it.  Thank God for Vicodin.    On the upside, the pain means that the shot is working so I would rather have it than not as my blood counts are staying relatively level and that is important.

The third day of chemo is when symptoms begin but it isn’t like they all come at once or stay the same length of time.  It is kind of like a storm rolling in over the course of a week – kind of like how it can rain for days but only one day you have lightening , and the varies, if that makes sense.   So I might have two days of weepy eyes, one day of a nosebleed, four days of hellish acid reflux feel, a week of super dry skin, a day with a sore mouth etc.   I won’t give you TMI on all that but suffice it to say – IT IS NOT FUN.  However, I am actually lucky that I have not been puking my guts out the way that most people think of chemo and the doctor says that generally I am tolerating this very well.  I pretty much feel “yucky” from Day 3 until around Day 12.  The things that last longer are being really thirsty all the damn time, a lot of things I like tasting like METAL (ick) or having texture issues, having a lot more stomach acid than ever in my life, and fatigue from the Seventh Level of HELL  (And don’t even get me started about the Hair loss.)

Yucky is manageable really because after the first treatment, the doctor said I could take/use a lot of things to help the symptoms and I have had helpful hints from others who have gone through this about things to eat that help a lot.  While they don’t get rid of the problems completely – I am a now and forever a huge fan of Tylenol and Tylenol PM, Pepcid, Imodium, Nilla Wafers, Gatorade, Ginger ale, Milk, Clear Eyes Tears Drops, Lubriderm lotion, Nailtiques nail protein, Ensure protein shakes,  Jell-O and Jell-O Pudding to name a few.

The only symptom that really hard to manage is the fatigue.  There really isn’t anything they can do about fatigue AND it gets worse each time, while the other symptoms just come and go.  I am doing okay enough so far, but I can feel it getting worse and it pisses me off.

Although magically, after the second week, I slowly start feeling better and more like my real self.  In fact, the couple days before the next treatment, I pretty much feel fine --- and then the bastards do it to me again……..