Cancer Update # 5 - Reactionary

I am in the midst of chemotherapy treatment #9 and am just 24 hours from being unplugged from my side-pump, which I have privately nicknamed something I won’t post here.  To bring everyone up to date, treatment #7 packed a punch in terms of energy drainage (coming second only to treatment #3).  Treatment eight was slower in regaining energy and taste buds.  Also, the day after I was unplugged from #7 my hands and toes were a nice shade of pink (somewhere between mauve and old blood) and feeling in my fingertips remains missing.  This will grow worse but, I am assured, the feeling will return, probably.  Number nine hasn’t been so bad, aside from the usual energy drain.

I’ll also mention I had my first reaction to a treatment.  Yesterday at the cancer center, on the last little baggie of poisonous-to-me cancer killer juice, my fingers began to have pinpricks, then my feet.  Then I had a fifteen minute hot-flash, some trouble breathing and my tongue suddenly felt two sizes too big.  By this time I figured I ought to get a nurse involved.  They turned off the little baggie, fanned me, and gave me a supra-shot of Benadryl.  I think it was Benadryl; then again I wasn’t thinking very clearly at the time.  When things calmed down I had to wait for 40 minutes and assure the nurse I was capable of driving myself home.  In the meantime, I was told I had a typical reaction and the culprit element in my chemotherapy cocktail will be changed for the last three treatments.  When the nurse was finally convinced of my sound-mind and dexterous self, I was free to go.  On the way out I pretended to stumble for a few steps in front of the nurses’ station.  They didn’t appreciate that very much at all, but I thought it was funny.

p.s. -- In October I’ve had 417 original page views.  That’s a new record.  Woo-hoo!