Wednesday, July 16, 2008

The First Chemo


This is my Grandma and I right before my diagnosis. And my beautiful hair.
I will post more pics of this period of time in my next entry. We can't find our USB cable right now


Before I started chemo, my office went out to a bar. I don't really remember what it was for, but it was really fun. I had made so many new friends and we just had a blast all hanging out and having a good time. I made my peace with the person that I had pissed off when I had sent out my e-vite for the party that I was supposed to have when I had surgery. Before everyone got there, I had dinner with one of my co-workers and it was really nice to have someone to talk to for a bit. We took tons of pictures and I had a ball laughing at everyone as they got more and more inebriated.


My mom decided to go with me to chemo. I was terrified. I had seen movies where people leave and immediately started vomiting, and I was scared that was going to happen to me. I had a terrible fear of throwing up, especially throwing up in public. I also was scared of needles. I couldn't imagine having an IV hooked up to me for several hours. I was also scared of the unknown – what was going to happen once the chemo started? Would I feel different, would I even notice? Would I feel it actually go in? All these questions plagued my mind.


Around 11 am, we got to the office. We sat in the waiting room for a while, again. Things seemed very disorganized and slow. It seemed like forever before we finally got to go back. The nurse weighed me, and took some blood. She led me back to the infusion room. The room itself was small. There were cabinets and a sink at one end and an exam table at the other end. In between, there were two recliners, a pink one and a black one, across from each other and a stool and a folding chair. I could see that the black recliner was the coveted one. There was a small TV/VCR by the door.


There was only one chair available, and it was the pink recliner. The rest of the chairs were taken up by people, most of them in blankets, who were in various stages of receiving their chemo. The exam table was occupied by a Vietnamese man and his daughter. I later learned that he was a single parent, receiving chemo and there was no one to take care of his daughter. Once I sat down, I was prepped for an IV line. The nurse gave me a bag of saline and it had begun. My mom had pulled in a folding chair from outside and sat down next to me. She had read somewhere that the chemo makes a bad taste in your mouth, so she had brought some hard candy with her. So we had one of those and sat back to survey our surroundings.


Dr. Sapra ran in around noon and turned the TV on to the stock channel and pushed a VHS tape in. And then he ran back out again. Soon, we noticed that my saline bag was running low. I called the nurse in. I was terribly afraid of the bag running out and then air getting into my veins. She turned the IV off and prepared another bag for me. This one was the beginning of chemo. I didn't really feel different, just a little anxious. The needle was uncomfortable and I was very careful not to move m arm. In return, my arm was very cold.


We talked a little bit to the people sitting around us. The Vietnamese man promised me that he would teach me his language. Everyone else seemed kind of out of it, or just not really wanting to talk. I started to get tired and encouraged mom to go take a walk or get something to eat. I just wanted to rest. Pretty soon, the nurse came back in and had a needle with a very large syringe attached to it. It was filled with a bright red liquid, like Cherry Kool-Aide. Slowly, she filled my line with this fluid. It was ice cold. I could feel it going in, and it wasn't very pleasant. Once she was done with that, she gave me a new bag of clear fluid. I didn't look to see what was in these bags, I just accepted it. Within a few hours, I was done. Once I was finished, I was pretty much the only person left in the room. The nurse removed my line, and gave me some basic instructions: Don't take aspirin, ibuprofen, pretty much anything without consulting Dr. Sapra first. Call if I get a fever above 99 degrees. Stuff like that. We got plenty of paperwork on the side effects and things to avoid. It was pretty scary.


We finished up with the instructions and went on our way. Mom took me to the salon to have my hair cut. The lady that was going to cut my hair was a gardening customer of my dad's. She was nice, I guess, but kind of standoffish. I had gone to school with her sons and daughter. This may have scared her a bit. We explained that I wanted to save my hair and she looked at us as if we were nuts. But, she cut my hair. Short. I looked down when she was done and saw all of my beautiful thick, long hair spread all over the floor. I guess she wasn't sure what to do with the hair that we wanted to save, so she just swept it up and put it into a bag for me to take home.


By the time we had finished that, I was famished. We went home and it was all I could do not to eat everything in the fridge. My dad laughed and decided that they put THC in my chemo. So far, I hadn't felt too different, no nausea, no pukes, nothing like that. I was hungry. That was probably all. I supposed that was a good thing. I had several calls from friends to find out how I was and how I was doing. I told them all that I was fine. I had trouble sitting still, I was very energetic and almost twitchy. I had a lot of trouble sleeping that night. My parents were surprised that my face was bright pink after I arrived home.


I tried to drink a lot of water, because I was told that it would help me flush all the drugs out of my system. It was also supposed to be the cure all for headaches. And I seemed to get a whopper of one. I don't know what I thought would happen, but I really didn't feel that different. There were some little things, the hunger, the headache, but nothing like I originally expected. That was good, right?