HALFWAY-ish
Oh hey internet friends! It’s been a while since my last update. Previously on Vanessa’s Chemo Diaries…I had JUST started chemotherapy, and was just a few days into the first cycle.
(Before I started chemo, I was really confused by the way it’s referred to in cycles, so I’ll try to explain how that works. The length of your chemo cycle will depend on what cancer you have and what chemo drug you are being treated with. My chemo cycle is 3 weeks, which means that each round of treatment lasts 21 days, then the cycle begins again. My cycle goes like this: Day 1 is infusion day — I get hooked up to a drip of a drug called Oxaliplatin which is administered over approximately 2 hours. Days 2–15 I take oral chemotherapy, pills called Capecitebine. Then days 16–21 are blissful rest days to give my healthy, non cancer cells a chance to heal and repair. During the rest week of each cycle I meet with my oncologist (Cool Garry — because he’s real cool and his name is Garry) to discuss how I’m managing side effects, to plan treatment and scans, get prescriptions and basically check in and make sure I’m as good as I can be!)
Where I’m at now: I’m about to start cycle 4 (meaning my 4th time getting hooked up to a 2 hour drip infusion of an EXTREMELY toxic chemical is coming up).
It’s been…a ride and a half.
Over the three cycles of chemo I have had so far, it’s become apparent that while most people on chemo react to the toxic chemicals in predictable ways, I’m the freak case that gets the rarest reactions and weirdest side effects that…really complicate things. During my second cycle, I ended up in hospital for a week because, it turns out, my body REALLY doesn’t like Oxaliplatin, and I have a reaction after each infusion that is rare enough that none of my team of amazing doctors and nurses have seen it before. (Basically, they think it’s doing something fucky to my autonomic nervous system and triggering a syndrome known as “Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome” — in the week after infusion, if I’m lying down, everything is fine, but if I am upright, my heart rate and blood pressure SKYROCKETS, just from being upright. It was a fun time in hospital being hooked up to telemetry and having the cardiac monitoring unit ring the ward every time I got up to pee, just because standing up made my heart rate shoot up to 150 bpm).
In figuring out how to treat the weirdo side effects and making decisions about if it’s worth continuing with a chemo drug that is making me quite ill, we did a scan (earlier than planned) to see how effective the treatment is at fighting the cancer. The reasoning being: if it’s not working and it’s causing all these issues, it’s an easy choice to switch to something else.
My sister and I met with Cool Garry to get the scan results. He was silent for a few seconds, comparing two pictures on his computer. Then he just said: “Scan looks good”.
The good news: after only 2 cycles, the chemo has been extremely effective, enough that some of the tumours in my lungs are now undetectable on my most recent scan. We are sticking with the Oxaliplatin (my extremely awesome doctors and Cool Garry have come up with a plan to treat the weirdo side effects and make it so my life is a good one).
