www.cancermonster.net

8:00a
It’s Sunday. I am home. Dan and I are trying to find something I can eat and keep down. I am afraid it’s trial and error at this point.

This first course of Chemo didn’t go as well as we expected. Not that we expected it to “go well.” We won’t be repeating this particular recipe.

We knew it would be harsh. “They” put you in the hospital to administer it. They know it will be harsh. This concoction included two different Chemo drugs. Doxorubicin (AKA Adriamycin) and Ifosfamide (AKA Ifex) along with another medicine named Mesna (Mesnex) used with Ifosfamide to protect the bladder.

The Doxorubicin is red. In smaller doses, both my parents had this chemo. Neither one of them handled it well. We were afraid of this red chemo. This chemo came in three bags that dripped for 24 hours each.

The Ifofamide was the one we needed to be afraid of. It came in four bags and took three hours for each bag to drip. One bag per day. Each bag started at around 8:30p. I didn’t make the forth bag.

Please keep in mind that this is just my own experience with this drug. And keep in mind that I have always tried to put the most positive spin on this Monster Fight of mine. But I can’t do that here. Just trying to remember it enough to write about it is making me feel nauseous. Not that I wasn’t nauseous, but it wasn’t that . . . It was the hallucinations. It was the tremors. It was the disconnection from reality.

I’m gonna take a break. . .

12:30p
It was a long break, during which I took a long nap, woke and put a few things away and made the children do some work. After some research online, Dan went to the store to find something I would eat . . . (It turns out grape tomatoes might work out.)

I was telling you about the chemo. I had planned to tell you all about the hallucinations in detail, but I find that I’m just not up to it yet. I will tell you an almost fatal mistake I almost made. And that was to try to hide what I was going through for fear they would take away the drugs I felt were my only chance at survival.

After the second bag of Ifosfamide, things started to go awry. I didn’t like the way I was feeling. My hands couldn’t type and my eyes were jumping, tunneling. The doctors came in on rounds and looked me over closely. They were wondering if I should continue the treatment. I heard in my head, “We need this Treese. Don’t let them take it away.” And so I covered. I told them it wasn’t so bad. I have been hiding my Fibromyalgia to some extent and it was something that I could hide this.

They hung the 3rd bag.

Now behind my bed in the wall was an old monitor system for calling the nurses station. I was told that only half of the floor was still using that old system. My room was on the new system - the speaker of which was built into my bed. Sometimes, however, sounds and calls from the other side of the floor would bleed through and I I could hear them coming from that old monitor. I know that this is real because other people heard it too! Haha
The problem is that the sounds and calls coming from that monitor started to get more common and louder. When the people started entering my room from that monitor, I knew I was in trouble. There was a doctor that I knew was not real, but in my room just the same attempting to put another bag on my IV. I couldn’t figure out how to get him to stop and go away without telling my mother who was in the room with me that he was there, see. Stuff like that. But worse.

In the middle of the night, I had a shower. I know the nurse had to have really been helping me, because to have a shower I needed to have my IV lines pinched off and covered with plastic. I think it was a long shower or a few showers . . . I don’t know. My mother helped me find something to wear afterwards, I think.

By the morning, my eyes were wrapped in tunnels of light shooting through the universe. I had given up on my computer and eating anything was out of the question. I was battling the people from the other monitor and all sounds had a dancing shape to them. The first doctor came in. I heard again, “we have to have this medicine.”

“I am better” It was what I could get myself to say clearly. “Better than yesterday.”

When she would ask how my tremors were, I said “Better.” My eyes? “Better.” I held it all in.

“OK then, I think we can go ahead with the last bag of Ifosfamide.”
Yippee.

As soon as she left the room, I started to retch. I fell apart and started shaking terribly. My mother was scared. I told her that I hadn’t told the truth. I told her that I was in bad trouble. “You have to tell them the truth. I know this for fact.”

My mother’s first chemo treatment didn’t go as planned either. I sat with her on a Friday as she got her first injection including the red stuff. I had to fly home in the middle of the night on Sat/Sunday. I didn’t know it, but my mother didn’t remember sitting with me at 3:00a and talking. She was on her way off. I flew home and she flew over the coo-coo’s nest. By Monday, she was in the hospital. Where I already was.

Mom went out to find that doctor and told her that I was lying. And I will always thank her for that act of kindness. When the whole team came in, I admitted what was going on and they all told me that it was stupid to be that desperate. There are other treatment courses. There are new trials. There was no use in toxifying my body to the point of destroying what we are trying to save. They would not hang the forth bag of Ifosfamide. They would let the last of the Doxorubicin drip through as well as all the detoxifying medications they had to get the rest of the side effects out of my system. They would hang the last bag of the Mesna for my bladder as well. They just were not going to give me anymore of the Ifosfamide. Pheww.

My sister-in-law Lisa and her daughter came in to relieve mom late that morning. Lisa watched over me as more of the side effects danced off in their corners. Dan came in by 8:00p, I think. He spent the night and took me home on Saturday. Dan and I have to drive back up there on Monday for some shots for my red and white blood counts. We’ll stay over in Anita’s motorhome and get ready for my port placement at noon, Tuesday, and a visit with a new doctor later that day. The new doctor will have a new plan to discuss. One that may include the Ifosfamide but at a slower pace. But I don’t know . . .

I am feeling better. Still shaky. Still figuring out what to eat . . . How to eat. I have lost thirty-eight pounds since the end of my radiation.

Would have been better to go to JennyCraig.