Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy - the process of pumping poison into your body so that the greedy cancer cells who desperately need energy to keep dividing at such a quick rate, will devour it and die. One of my first oncologists told me that it was his job to know how much poison he could put in me without killing me while giving me enough to kill the cancer.

It is much easier to take chemo if you have a port surgically inserted just below your skin on your upper chest which utilizes direct access to a larger vein as opposed to trying to insert an IV for each treatment. I have to have blood work done before each chemo treatment which means I've been stuck so many times my veins have collapsed and every week I dread drawing blood more that I do accessing my port (which hurts no matter how they try to deaden it).

In an effort to offset the dehumanizing idea of poisoning oneself, the "infusion room" sports large, comfortable recliners, free coffee and snacks and on Wednesdays, one of the volunteers brings in her service dog, Bailey. Petting a dog makes everything better, as do Debby's lemon bars. My husband John comes with me to every treatment even though most of the time I fall asleep while he is doomed to watch "The Price is Right," and "Let's Make a Deal."  He never complains.

There has been a huge advancement in drugs to prevent nausea. In fact, the side effects I most dread are of the shots you get after the treatments and the steroids which help you tolerate the poison. The shots make your bones ache as they try to stimulate blood cell production in the marrow and the steroids really mess up your blood sugar and make it hard to sleep. However, when the steroids wear off, all you want to do is sleep as your body tries to fight the effects of the poison on every other organ in your body.  I'm really only sick for a couple of days however. By the 4th day after chemo, I start to feel normal again.

There are other complications with chemo however. I've been hospitalized twice for runaway infections. Any little bug can put you into the emergency room when you have no immunity to fight it. The first time I was ever really afraid I might die was when my temperature just keep rising regardless of the amount of antibiotics they were pumping through my body. If my husband hadn't insisted we go to the hospital when we did, we may not have been able to get my temp down in time.

A third hospitalization was for a pulmonary embullism or blood clots in my lungs.  Cancer makes the blood coagulate easier and so blood clots in my legs formed which moved up to my lungs making it extremely difficult to breathe and forcing my heart to pump like crazy to try to get the blood past the clots for oxygenation. I could barely move without breathing so heavily I had to stop and sit.  I was put on anti-coagulants and a little filter was put into my groin through a vein in my leg that is supposed to catch any more blood clots that decide to visit my lungs.  The body dissolves the clots already formed in a few weeks time so after 4 days in the hospital, it took about a month to start to feel normal again.  Apparently this is pretty common but it scared the heck out of me.

My biggest nemesis by far however is chemo brain. Trust me, it is real. It amplifies the memory problems that accompany aging tenfold. I have no short-term memory. It is much harder for me to learn new things. I wonder if I could ever go back to work as I don't remember how to use the software. I've noticed that since my first experience with chemo 3 years ago that the brain function doesn't come back. I hate feeling so stupid and spending half my life looking for things I've lost. Everyday tasks like paying bills is difficult. I used to teach graduate level courses and be in charge of guidance departments for large schools. The one thing I could count on was my brain and it has been definitely compromised by the chemo.

Most cancers can now be treated with much more specific drugs that don't necessarily poison the whole body but triple negative breast cancer is a very aggressive, fast growing cancer that takes pulling out all the big guns to try to arrest its growth. I am hoping that after chemo, the surgeon at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa will remove my left breast again. After it was removed originally, some breast tissue was left for reconstruction and that is where the cancer returned. Since we know the cancer metastasized to a lymph node in the abdomen, we know it has traveled through my body and will likely show up somewhere else as soon as the chemo is stopped. Consequently, the surgeon doesn't want to put me through surgery knowing that the chances of having gotten all the cancer with chemo, eliminating the tissue it will probably reoccur in, and then zapping everything with radiation will not result in a cure. I'm still willing to give it a shot.  I have another 8 weeks of chemo before my oncologist and I try to talk him into doing the surgery. Remember what I said about denial never really going away?