Hot Mess

Well last week was my first week of chemotherapy and immunotherapy. To say it didn’t go quite as I had hoped is a bit of an understatement. Thursday’s will be the day I get treatment for the indefinite future, so Brent and I get up Thursday morning to snow. Ya – the one day of the week we get weather is the day we need to drive 3.5 hours. But both of us being early birds, and me wanting to get this party started – we were up early enough and ready to head out with more than enough time. The roads were fine and we got to Cancer Care Northwest with half an hour to spare. Every time I have had appointments with them they are very timely, every time I am there with Brent they are running late. So 30 minutes after my scheduled appointment I finally get in to see my oncologist. I am so amped up because (back to the beginning of this blog) I just want to get this party started that I’m talking a mile a minute to my doctor, Brent is over there waiting for me to say “sold” like an auctioneer at the end of my sentence. My doctor is like “are you okay”, and I’m just like I’m really impatient, and she comments sarcastically, “no, you don’t say”. Ha – funny doc.

So after meeting with her, going over possible side effects, getting some more medicines prescribed to deal with the after effects of the radiation I finally head back to the infusion room.

This is the first time I have done infusion at this center so I enter the room – it is set up similar to the other – an open concept, recliners facing a nursing station (although much nicer than St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in the fact that the general public can’t see you). I check in and they have me grab an empty chair (there are only 2 available). The nurse comes over, asks me my name and birthdate (something you end up giving about 347 times during these treatments it seems), and I ask for something to drink. She informs me there is a little snack bar and to go explore before they get me hooked up. So I go check out the minifridge, grab a couple juices and a little snack and get settled back in. Now they were unable to schedule my chemoport placement prior to this first infusion so they are just going to do it via vein, I have been drinking sooooo much water because my mouth and throat are just dried out from radiation, in addition I can’t taste anything so I am salting the crap out of everything, which is another tip they recommend before trying to poke a vein – drink lots of water and add some salt to your diet. The nurse comes over and attempts to put in a line. The nice thing at least with these nurses that put in lines is that you can’t really feel it because they are such pros, but she attempts twice on the crook of my elbow with absolutely no success. She can’t use the other arm because I had lymph nodes removed from there. So they finally settle on the hand and a new nurse comes over and one and done she gets the IV in the hand. So 2 hours after my scheduled appointment I am FINALLY starting my infusion. For all of you who know me, and I’m thinking everyone who is reading this knows me – this is about the greatest form of torture that can be done. I am the LEAST patient person on the face of the earth and I want to get this party started!!!!!

So infusion therapy treatment is just an IV drip taking several hours – it should be a relatively boring process (stress should). My first drip is the immunotherapy treatment and it goes off without a hitch, they then give me some saline, some benadryl and get ready for the next drug – Taxol. Now when I had chemo the first round I had Taxotere, they are both derived from the Pacific yew (something found right here on the forest I work for) – and I had an allergic reaction (hence why they were giving me benadryl pre treatment). The first time round was flushing primarily but also hives later on. So the nurse is like I’m going to watch you and you give me a thumbs up if everything is going ok. I’m like ok. 5 minutes. I made it 5 freaking minutes before I feel my cheeks get hot but worse off I felt like someone was putting a vise on my chest – all I was thinking was am I having a panic attack because I’m flushing again and I really want this drug to work or is this a new reaction. Then I realize I can’t breathe and I have a real panic attack. I look up at the nurse she gives me a thumbs up and I wave at her to come over. Her and every nurse in the room are at my station. I tell her I can’t breathe as the vise on my chest gets tighter and tighter. But my body is a damn oxymoron – they hook me up to an oxygen monitor and I’m at 100%. Seriously, WTF. My cancer comes back in my lungs and they are like do you have shortness of breath, a cough, pain in the chest? Nope! Maybe if I exercised regularly I would have been aware but when I did the pulmonary tests I was scoring 115%. I get diagnosed the first time not because I had any indication there was a problem but because I went in for a baseline. I find out I have lesions all over my brain because I have vertigo which everyone assumes is from an 80 degree temperature shift giving me an ear infection. My cancer recurs outside of the window of triple negative (3 years is the golden rule – I hit 4). My body isn’t a temple, it is a damn temple of doom – with booby traps everywhere.

So back to the veritable shit show (and yes, that is what it is right now). I am sitting there still as a rock, tears streaming down my face, trying not to have a panic attack on top of the allergic reaction that is happening why every nurse in the infusion room is jamming steroids, benadryl and who knows what else into my IV line as fast as they can to the point my hand is on fire. They have a nebulizer going for me, oxygen hooked up and all I can think is that my sweet niece and friend Erin’s kid do this and they handle it with way more grace than I can right now, get your shit together girl. So in my previous post I mentioned that for 23.5 hours of the day I am pretty upbeat, taking a positive outlook on the hand that has been dealt me – but for 30 minutes I kind of lose it. I think you might all guess where that 30 minutes fell on Thursday. So 30 minutes after everything went south, the vise was gone, they had talked to my doctor and anything with the Pacific Yew is off the table, she’s going to get me a new drug and they are running some saline through me to get me back to baseline. So if you come and visit me and Brent is planting Pacific Yew on the property, you know him and I are in need of a break from each other! They give me my last chemo drug and thankfully that goes off without a hitch. I had joked with the nurses when I first came in that I wanted to make an impression so they didn’t forget who I was since I would be there weekly for a stretch – I guess I just didn’t want to make THAT much of an impression. The infusion fiasco finally ends and a nurse comes in to draw some blood. She can’t get blood from this turnip and proceeds to lecture me that I need to drink more and consume some salt (seriously….that is ALL I’m doing, even Brent later commented I just got done having 3 hours of saline and fluids pumped in me).

So I am the last person to leave the infusion room 5 hours after my scheduled start time. My body is humming with all the steroids and other drugs they have pumped into me. We get checked into our hotel room and I get about 4 hours of sleep that night as I can’t come down from the “high” of all the drugs coursing through me. At least I’m not sick, the drugs they gave me to help prevent seem to have worked.
So tomorrow I enter a new week of my new reality. I have my chemoport insertion scheduled for this Tuesday so we will spend the whole week back in Spokane, not worth driving up and back and then going up again a day later. Hopefully though after this we can shorten our stays in Spokane to just an overnighter.

Fingers crossed that this will be a much calmer ride this week – I’ve made my impression. Here’s mud in your eye cancer!