Ok, yeah, this is what I imagined chemo is supposed to feel like.
I woke up this morning feeling pretty nauseous after waking up an hour before my alarm with feverish thoughts. Have you ever had one of those work dreams where you dream you're handling a monotonous task at work all night, and you wake up mentally exhausted? I had one of those for the last hour of sleep...dreaming that people kept handing me memos and I kept putting them somewhere in my mind, scanning them and trying to keep track of them all. I then woke up feeling nauseous, as someone who spent a good chunk of their morning handling nonsense paperwork might.
After a slow shower, an even slower breakfast and a long nap in the car, I finally made it to my final chemo appointment of the week. The nurse took one look at me and gave me some more anti-nausea medication and some Tylenol.
Fast forward two hours, and here I am, much more chipper and happily snacking on saltine crackers, waiting for this final chemo treatment to be done. After this marathon week, I only have one appointment next Tuesday, one appointment the following Tuesday, and that's it. Well...that's it for round one. I'll be going through three rounds total, but I'm not thinking about another marathon week yet...I'll deal with that one when it comes around.
I'm looking at this whole experience of going through chemo as something that will shock my kids and grandkids in the future. There have been some magnificent advances in cancer research in the past 30 years, and I just know that there are going to be many more in the next 30. It's for this reason that I think when my kids hear I went through chemotherapy treatment where they put a port in me and pumped drugs directly into my veins, it's going to be like hearing I had a relative that was given leeches for a blood transfusion.
I have a feeling in the near future, very few people are going to look back at a time where we pumped drugs into the veins of cancer victims as a team of "breakthrough science." Hopefully in the future, very precise surgery will be developed, pills with few side effects will be developed to be taken (hopefully orally...oh man, hopefully orally) and cancer will be like the yellow plague of my grandparents' generation. Until then, though, I've got to sit in this chair and go through this iron-lung garbage. Fortunately, it's successful, but just a bit miserable.
Sharing this discussion with my nurse this morning, she said when she was involved with administering chemo 20 years ago, they had very few other drugs to help combat the side effects, so people just had to deal with the nausea. She recalled one person she helped out coming up to her years later and telling her that the sight of her still made her nauseous. Man, and I thought back when I worked in the insurance industry it was bad when going into work made myself nauseous...I can't imagine if it had the same effect on other people (besides my then-boss).
On the plus side, I'm done with my fifth-straight chemo session. That's five days down, 58 to go. OR, if you look at it optimistically, that's 5 sessions down, 16 to go (which is a much better way to view it). Now, I've got a weekend full of, for the first time in many months, NOTHING. TV, video games, board games, movies and hanging out with my awesome wife. I'm sure I'll catch up on sleep and hopefully eat some food that tastes like something other than acid, and be ready to hop back into the chair next Tuesday...getting ready to adjust to this new version of normal. Getting used to food tasting differently, feeling weaker, waking up nauseous and having standing appointments for nearly half of the next month.
Well, it could be worse...I could still have a ballsack full of cancer with a nutty center. I'll take the cure over the disease any day.
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