Catia Bitching Cancer

My first day of chemo, that is.

Turns out that, with a score of 14 on my Oncotype, even Francesca who had been so strongly opposed to chemo for me, thought that chemo is going to increase my chances of being disease-free in 10 years by too high a percentage to pass. So I reluctantly went ahead. I talked to Dr. Faith, who agreed to give me the type of chemo I asked for, rather than the one she originally suggested and yesterday I went to the chemo room with Bruce all uppity and in good spirit .

They injected me with two big syringes of a bright red substance (which is making me pee pink) and a smaller syringe of a clear substance. The other medicine was administered via IV drip, together with lots of saline solution and the anti-nausea medication.

We were done in about two hours, and though I felt a little tired and light headed, when I came back I took the car to go visit a friend. She wasn’t home, so I came back, made pizza for everybody then lay down on the couch. It wasn’t too long that I started burping gas and feeling slightly nauseous and not much longer that I had to run to the bathroom. I barely made it to the toilet, where I barfed up my entire Subway sandwich I had eaten while on IV and then all the water I drank and was injected with. When all was out, I felt much better, but although the pizza was tempting, I asked Bruce to prepare a soup for me….well, that didn’t stay down either. A couple of hours after I had sipped it, it came right out in a bucket that Bruce had prepared next to our bed. So much for the anti-nausea medications!

My cancer friends advised me to take the anti-nausea (I have three different ones, but one says “as needed”) before I feel I need it, so this morning that’s what I did: I popped all the pills down before getting out of bed. So far water and tea stay down, but I’ll wait another hour or so before trying to eat something (I am HUNGRY!!!). If that doesn’t work, I’ll try pot. But even that now is not that appealing, as I feel totally dehydrated. Funny how you hear and worry a lot about losing hair when you are on chemo. Right now I’d take hair loss anytime!

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