First Day of School

Just like all first days of school, even though you are prepped with schedules and programs, nothing ever turns out as expected. First, I had an appointment for a chest x-ray and a ECG. These were totally different departments and I needed to check-in at both places. The chest x-ray was easy, get yourself into a gown and stand in front of a plastic board and get your picture taken. Took 1 minute. Then I went across the hall for the ECG which tests your heart for any abnormalities. Again, get undressed and put a towel on your chest. I lay there as a technician places small black stickers on different parts of my body--legs, arms, breast, and chest. Then she takes out this power bar with octopus arms that have clips on the ends of the wires to attach to the stickers on my body. I hold still for a second and it's over.

A half hour break and we're back in another area of the building to meet my oncologist who switched offices from my last visit. She pops in to tell me that my CT scan was clear (yea, only cancer in the breast!!--As Jackie says, this is our twisted humour these days), and if I minded talking to her resident first. Of course, I had to remove my top yet again for the third time, cause who doesn't want to take a look?! So in our discussion with the resident, we find out that the handout that outlined my treatment was the WRONG handout given to me! The original 15 months of chemo that was in the handout should've been only 6 months! To give some background, my chemo cocktail is called ACD. However, they have two handouts, a ACD, and a ACDT. Well, tack on that T and it adds 9 months to the treatment so again, I celebrated, "Yea, only 6 months of chemo!!" So my oncologist said that everything looks well in my heart and chest from tests that I took earlier so we could go ahead with treatment today.

We took a brief lunch since we were to return at 2pm for a "teaching" session before proceeding to the actual treatment at 4pm--well, that's what they told us anyway. So of course, after asking two different people where we were supposed to check in, we finally get to the right place where I meet our nurse. She takes us to a room that has 4 pastel green vinyl reclining chairs, peptol bismol curtains, and beige everywhere else. I turned to Elt and vowed that if I were to win the lottery, I'd come back to renovate this atrocity. Where's the sounds of the tropical rainforest and dim lighting? While I strip the room with my eyes, she starts wrapping a towel around my arm, asking me how I'm doing, and I'm like, "Uhh...are we doing it right now? I thought this was a teaching time?" She's like, "Oh yeah, we bumped you up from 4pm. We usually just do the talk with you at the same time so don't worry." I take a second to wrap my brain around this and we go on with it like everything else this past week.

I was given 4 anti-nausea pills before we got started. For the first 4 cycles of treatment, I will be getting the AC drugs (the ones that cause nausea and hairloss). The first one gets injected into the IV by a 2 giant syringes filled with red kool-aid (yes, I was peeing kool-aid). The next drug was just given by an IV drip. Whole thing took abut 2 hours. I felt fine on the way home and ate some crackers but should've just eaten a hearty meal instead. By the time I got home and lay down to rest, I started feeling the nausea creep up. I was warned time and time again about keeping my stomach full, everything's a learning curve. I only got sick once which wasn't bad at all considering. I stayed in bed for a full day but today, I ate macaroni in soup and even got out around the house. After staying a full day and night at my aunt's place, Liam looked at me as if I was a huge lasagna and he was Garfield! He couldn't get enough of me so I can't last too long in bed, even if I wanted. Aidan seems to want a bit more attention today than usual but all is to be expected. I told him briefly today that I had a "bump" and I let him feel it. I told him the medicine was going to help make the bump smaller and that's why I was tired. He rolled around and went back to Ratatouille. The only real drama we had today was when the iPad was misplaced for 5 hours!

My family's been great helping this weekend and my mom came back today so it's going to be much easier with the cook in town. Thanks for the emails and texts.

J