Happy New Year! A little New Year/Old Year Retrospective:

One year ago yesterday I had my first R-CHOP infusion and I cannot tell you what fun that was.  I think I pissed off the head nurse.  Either that or she liked me.   It is very hard to tell.

We arrived in the waiting room of the infusion center and a hospital identification band with my name and number was clipped around my left wrist.   We took a seat on a couch and I looked around at the other patients.  One that caught my eye was a very young woman who looked in her teen years.  She had long blond hair and was dressed in comfortable looking gray sweats.  She was with her parents.   

I was haunted by the thought of someone so innocent and attractive having to endure what she was about to go through.

Of course I have no idea what regimen she was going to be on but I thought she was awfully young to have to face the consequences of this kind of therapy.  But I suppose cancer drives us to embrace horrid therapies.

In due time my oncologist showed up with an envelope of prescriptions and the pathology report from the PET scan which showed that I had many more tumors than the one that gave me headaches.

Altogether Mary and I counted six tumors and as Mary looked though the document she noted where the tumors weren't.  They seemed to have missed the places that would be difficult to treat.

But I had one in my liver and one in my spleen which might explain some of the days that I had felt very bad.

My oncologist also explained the drugs that I would be taking each day for up to the first five days.  Chief among these was a heavy duty steroid prednisone, a choice of drugs to relieve the nausea (one was zofran and the other compazine) and a big orange pill which was I believe allopurinol which is used to treat gout.  This last drug was to counteract the problem of the tumor cells breaking down and putting all kinds of things that should be inside of cells into my bloodstream.

I think we were some of his first patients because he only gave me 5 days worth of prednisone and limited quantity of zofran because it was expensive.   We ended up having a little talk about how he was increasing our costs because of how he was prescribing his drugs.   My oncologist had been a researcher in Seattle before coming to Chapel Hill and I do not believe that he had spent a great deal of time with human subjects.   Patients.

He is Asian, and I believe hit it off with my wife better than me.  Although he tolerated my rambling.   Mary and I both liked him immediately.

We were called into the infusion center and I was shown to a very comfortable reclining chair.   Mary had to make do with something merely functional.

The ubiquitous question when you are in a cancer hospital and they are about to take blood or infuse you is: "Do you have a port?"

That is because at least one of the drugs is essentially caustic and the other drugs are not good for your veins.

They put the needle into a vein near the surface so they could tell it was in the vein and let it drip saline for a while.   The nurse explained the nature of the drugs - if they put it in higher near the elbow and missed the vein the joint at the elbow might need replacement.

It gives new meaning to the words "dangerous drug".

Since I had a port for the following infusions I can tell you that it is indeed better.  But it still hurts when they put the needle in.

The head nurse explained that they would titrate the first drug because some people have a bad reaction to it.   They explained that they did this for patients initially so that they didn't kill them.  Or some such words.

It could be a fatal reaction.

So we waited, and waited and it dripped and dripped and I had absolutely no reaction.  They kept asking if I was cold and if my heart was causing me to rock side to side and I always said no.

What I did notice within a couple of hours of this was that the headache was going away and my neck was feeling better.   A little part of me was thinking that all they needed to give me was that one drug and the cancer would go away.

We left the cancer hospital late and because it was new years eve we had to venture into the parking structure which is up a long ramp and some distance away.   The side effects of the drugs hadn't hit me yet.   As we walked out of the hospital one of the nurses who had stayed late to handle my case turned to us and said good night and Happy New Year. 

Mary and I stopped off at Burger King that evening after visiting the drug store to get my batch of prescriptions filled.   I was destined to sleep in our "Venus fly trap chair" a big stuffed leather chair and ottoman that is very comfortable and I would sweat up my T-shirt and shorts that night. 

I developed cancer sometime about my 60th birthday and it wasn't treated for six months. It gave new meaning to the term "New Year" because although I would get up the next morning after an almost sleepless night feeling horrid I had a new lease on life.

Within a week the swelling on the inside back of my throat had gone down and I could sleep in a bed again.

And then it was just a matter of making it though the treatments.  Or so I thought, considering that the treatments themselves can be physically devastating.