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Sarahthequeen05

I am a spunky 25-year-old living in a suburb of Tampa. I was relocated here with my husband of 2 years from western North Carolina when the Air Force decided that we were needed in sunny Florida! I had almost all the best times of my life at Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC, the oldest women's c...

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Everything You Wanted to Know About Chemotherapy But Were Afraid to Ask

Sorry guys, this one's a little bitchy...

Another random melange of verbal crap.  This is mostly because today was a chemo day and my brain is full of medicinal crap, so I least I'm taking a theme and running with it.  It’s all crap.  Seriously though, as much as I know you people are tired of hearing my chemo tirades, I have to tell you a snippet from today.  I had an almost-out-of-body experience, but not really one of the spiritual variety.

Ok, so I have to give you a wee bit of background in the wonderfully fascinating world of pharmaceuticals to have any of this make sense, but please bear with me.  My chemo is made up of 4 different medicines.  Two of them are mostly small doses and the chemo nurse pushes the blunt syringe full of toxic stuff into my IV line, and the other two are larger amounts, so they slowly drip in through IV bags.  Still with me so far?  Good. 

One of my meds, generic name doxorubicin, is awful.  Every time I go to the oncologist, someone always manages to tell me how particularly heinous it is, compared to all the other types of chemo they see every day.  This always cheers me up to no end.  It looks pretty harmless- I only get 46 CCs of it, and it’s bright red, rather like Hawaiian Punch.  It was discovered in the 1950s when the French started trying to make antibiotics out of a particular type of microbe that lived in the soil surrounding the Catsteldel Monte in Apulia, Italy- the microbes themselves produce the bright red pigment.  So, there’s our bio lesson for today, folks. 

So, although fascinated by the fact that this seemingly harmless dirt-based antibiotic would kill my cancer, it scares me.  A lot.  But, I didn’t quite realize how bad it was until today.

The nurse sat down and hooked the syringe up to the IV line going into my port, which is in my upper right chest wall, connected to my venacava.  She pulled on the syringe, diluting the medicine with my own blood, because it’s so terrible that you can’t have it straight up.  I noticed she was wearing bright blue gloves.  Normally, I’m so absorbed playing computer games or reading that I don’t really pay any attention to the two drugs that they push through the line.

“Um, why do you have on different gloves?”

“Well, this drug is a vesicant.”

“Ah.”  Although possessed with a fairly nice vocabulary (I can make it to level 46 on the freerice website), I had no idea what this meant.  “What does that mean?”

“It means that it causes extensive damage to your tissues and would burn through regular gloves and through my skin if I got some on me.”  She said this completely unfazed by the fact that my eyes were about to bug clear out of my head.

“Oh.”  It was all I could think of to say.  I was just floored.  In my head though, I could see myself jumping out of my chair and saying, “So what part of inserting it into the largest vein in my body, you know, the one that returns all my deoxygenated blood back to my heart for more oxygen, which is RIGHT ON TOP OF MY HEART, makes sense?”

But I just sat there.  As much as I trust my chemo nurses and they are truly saints, I had to google this one when I came home.  Sure enough, here’s the info that I got from Scott Hamilton’s (the ice skater’s), website:

Adriamycin is a vesicant.  A vesicant is a chemical that causes extensive tissue damage and blistering if it escapes from the vein.

Adriamycin’s the brand name, named after the Adriatic Sea, which is where they found the microbes that they make the drug from today, the previous Italian microbes caused too much fatal heart problems or something so it was banned in the 1960s.  According to Scott, I’ll only have a 6%-20% chance of fatal heart toxicity from the new drug based on the lifetime maximum dose I’ll be receiving.  Oh, and in tiny print at the bottom I’m advised that there’s only about a 10% chance I’ll get some kind of leukemia later on.

Indeed.

But, I am really not all that peeved about it.  Most of this stuff I already knew, but the vesicant part did freak me out.  I know I have to have it and that it will make me better.  I am thrilled that I have 4 (WHOO-HOO!), treatments under my belt.  I just get whiny on my chemo days and wish there was another way instead of bi-weekly ritualistic poisonings.  I will say it again, my cancer wasn’t that bad but the chemo is rough.  I’m done whining now, I think.  Maybe.

(I was also advised by my onc doc that another one of my drugs is so bad that they removed it from the regimen for testicular cancer patients because they all became deathly ill from it but they kept it in mine.  I waited for him to say, “Just kidding!  It’s really not so bad, I’m just pulling your leg.”  But there was only an awkward silence.  Sigh.)

I will share with you a graphic example of how I picture chemotherapy.  Do you know what chiggers are?  Well, if you don’t you’ll just have to wiki it yourself because I don’t think anyone else wants to read about their life cycle.  But, I digress. 

Anyway, suppose you’re out mowing your grass in the early spring or weeding your jonquils or whatever it is you do in the outdoors.  And you get a chigger bite on your lower left calf, kind of towards the back of your leg.  You’re not exactly the crispiest French fry in the bag, and you don’t know what the heck it is, so you go to your doctor, because it’s itching up a storm and cortaid is useless.  There’s a welt around the bite about the size of a 50-cent piece.  You aren’t smart enough to realize this is normal for chiggers, which are the Devil Incarnate.

Your doctor, well, he’s kind of a back-alley deal and clearly didn’t attend Duke Med or even the Cayman Islands Correspondence School of Medicine and Culinary Institute.  He’s special.  So, he decides that the only way to remove this large round mass that is raised up on your leg is with a double-barrelled shotgun. 

The shotgun of course, blows your entire lower left leg off, but you reason that this extra ounce of prevention was called for, seeing as the chance of receiving a chigger bite on your lower left leg is now non-existent.  You are cured from lower-left-leg chigger bites for the rest of your life because since you no longer have a lower left leg, it is inhospitable territory- chiggers don’t want to bite you there.  Your leg is unpalatable.

So, what I’m really trying to say with all of that is that I think that the real function of chemo is to make me so icky that nothing will want to take up a homestead in my body for a long, long time.  Like my own personal environmental disaster- the Exxon Valdez has nothing on what’s mambo-ing through my veins right now, which is probably rather sludgy and oil-like.

That’s it.  A little informative, a lot bitchy.  And definitely more than you ever wanted to know about chemotherapy.

In other news, one of our fish committed suicide.  The random twisted bits of my life seem to travel in packs.  I was walking across the floor yesterday afternoon and screamed because I almost stepped on him.  It was so sad.  It was one of our golden killiwonderfish, which I adore a) because their names sound like superheroes, and b), because the way that their mouths are shaped they look like  they’re smiling all the time.  Here’s a picture of one from animal-world.com:

Our’s actually had more vibrant colors- kind of a blue/gold iridescent with red tips on his fins.  Beautiful fish, really, and funny.

I’m tired and can’t focus my eyes properly so I’m going to bed.  I won’t sleep for a while, thanks to the steroid they give me as part of my pre-chemo regimen (an additional 6 drugs before my chemo), which keeps me awake. 

I’d like to end on a happy note.  There was a beautiful woman sitting beside me during chemo today with a gorgeous black and white silk Banana Republic scarf on her head who told me that I was beautiful and that she wished she had the courage to go without the scarf, but she can’t just yet.  It was so humbling and I was so taken aback that I thanked her profusely about 9 ways to Sunday and said something sheepish like, “Oh, well, it’s a matter of necessity really, beause my ears stick out so much more when highlighted by a scarf.”  Which is utterly true, but I was so pleased.

I love you all, thanks so much for your support even on my Eeyore-resplendent whiny days.  Kisses.