Staging, chemo 1, and aftermath

Well, it has been a heck of a week. Monday, I met with a nurse for new patient chemo orientation. She gave me a stack of material to read, a ton of information about what to expect, and accessed my port for the first time to do a blood draw. Basically, she used a freezing spray to completely numb the area, and then stuck a needle through and into the port itself.

This is essentially what happens when they access the port.

My port being accessed for the first time.

It wasn't a big deal at all.... and I definitely prefer them being able to access my port this way rather than having to constantly stick me to draw blood and administer the chemo.

On Tuesday I went in and met with my oncologist. We went through all of the test results that we have gotten to point. The lung and heart function test came back normal, and cleared me to have chemotherapy. My PET scan came back showing 4 masses all along the same lymph node chain, but fortunately no spread anywhere on the other side of the diaphragm, so I am classified as Stage 2a. Our current course of treatment will be 8 sessions of chemotherapy, which breaks down to 1 session every other week for 4 months, and then radiation afterwards. Dr. Spillane answered a few more questions, and then I was taken for my first round of chemotherapy. 

The chemotherapy area is not very big, but it is comfortable. There were lots of squishy reclining chairs, and I settled into one while my nurse went to go grab my own personal chemo cocktail. 

 Our squishy chairs.

Maybe it is weird to say this, but the chemo areas themselves are nice, for what they are. All of the nurses are friendly, the other patients will smile or occasionally say something to you, but ultimately it is fairly depressing, when you really take the time to think about why everyone is there. I tried not to focus on that too hard, and they set me up to get ready to administer my treatment. Before they actually pump the drugs in, they access the port, the same way that they had on Monday, (sanitize, freeze, access) and then they dripped a steroid and a couple of anti nausea medications into me. When we were all ready to go, they brought out my chemo drugs. Each type of cancer is treated with different type of chemotherapy drugs/radiation or both in conjunction. For Hodgkin's, the standard treatment is called A/B/V/D. It is four different drugs - Adriamycin, Bleomycin, Vinblastine, and Dacarbazine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABVD 

My drug bags.

Three of the drugs are what are called "push drugs", which means that they're administered by a nurse who pushes them slowly in through my port with a large syringe. 

Getting my Adriamycin. It's a dark orange color drug, that turns my pee bright red. Fun, right?

Then they dripped the Dacarbazine in, which is a slow drip that took another hour and 45 minutes. The whole process only took about 3 hours, and wasn't horrible. They flushed my port with heparin (ew.. horrible taste) and then I was free to go.

I picked up some prescriptions from the pharmacy, mostly anti-nausea medications, and headed back home. The anti nausea meds that they had pumped into me before my chemotherapy began to wear off after about 6 hours, so I took one of my meds and tried to rest. At one point, I had about 2 hours left until I was allowed to take my next anti-nausea pill and things were so bad that I curled up in a ball in bed and just sobbed. Not my best moment....

Things were a little bit better the next day, after I had gotten some rest. I found that if I let my stomach get too empty, I tend to get very sick to my stomach and not be able to eat. I was still bone tired on Wednesday (my birthday), and I was scheduled for 3 appointments on top of it. I had a consultation with the radiologist, who will meet with me again after I have my 4th chemotherapy session, to talk about my progress and discuss how much radiation treatment I will go through after I complete my chemo. I then met with my nurse navigator, and a cancer nutritionist to talk about what to expect for the next 6 months or so. 

I feel like I am leaving a lot of things out, but this week has been a bit of a blur. As far as side effects from the chemo -- I am trying not to push myself too hard, because I will suddenly feel extremely exhausted out of nowhere at times. I had pretty weird radiating mouth pain for a couple of days, and my scalp is tingling and sore in spots, and my hair is now (slowly) starting to fall out. According to everything that I have read, I will really start to see my hair come out in clumps about 13-15 days post chemo. When I have that happen, I'm probably going to just shave it off, rather than facing a hair all over my pillow each morning. 

I think that is it for now, I will post more about this past week tomorrow, when today slows down. Love to you all!