I had never wondered what it would feel like to receive chemotherapy until I found out that it was entirely likely I was going to be required to experience it first hand. Once I discovered that I would indeed be finding out exactly what it was like, I timidly pondered the various possibilities in the recesses of my curiosity, but generally avoided thinking about it. There was only so much timidity my mind would put up with, though, and the three days prior to my first chemo treatment was a grotesque orgy of nervous speculation. But it was cathartic, and on Tuesday the 6th of November I swept into the Cancer and Blood Disease Center like a cool breeze and went through the motions like there was nothing curious about it.
And nothing new, different or odd occurred on that morning/afternoon, I know – it’s been going on for years, infiltrating millions of people’s lives and improving with the evolution of science and medicine – but it was all new and different and previously nerve wracking to me.
When the time came for it to infiltrate my little world, though, I was as prepared as I could be and grinned, bared it and took it like a champ; a champ that stayed in bed for most of the rest of the day afterwards, but a champ nonetheless.
It was a slightly strange thing to experience because every evolutionary instinct that has kept our species in existence was kicking and screaming at me to get away from that stuff immediately. Of course this reaction didn’t happen right away because they don’t start administering the chemo until about an hour into the process, but as soon as those toxic substances began eroding my veins and waging war against my entire cellular being, my life energies demanded that I rip the iv out directly and find means to a blood transfusion forthwith.
Here’s what happens:
First they do blood work, because they always do blood work. The vein in my left arm is getting really pissed off about all the stabbing and sucking that is being done to it on at least a bi-weekly basis (they can’t take blood from the right arm because that’s the side I had lymph nodes removed from)and it has recently started to refuse closing up after blood is drawn, figuring it might as well just stay open permanently.
After they do the blood work and decide whether or not you’re well enough to get chemo, they send you in the back where all of the treatments take place. It’s basically one very large room separated into a couple of different areas by tall book cases and dividers that section off a nurse’s station, a couple of patient areas and a little family waiting area.
You walk down a long, meandering hallway from the waiting area and through an archway; ten feet back is the nurse’s desk. Beyond the nurse’s desk are tables, book shelves, filing cabinets, storage closets, and mixing areas; basically the typical kind of nurse’s station you’ll find in any medical facility, except this one has a very high concentration of highly toxic chemicals meant to be injected into people. All along the walls behind you to your right and left are these old blue recliners with a plastic type material covering them, and next to every recliner is a metal bag hanger on wheels that they hang the saline, steroids and chemo from. On the far right hand side is the family waiting area, and just beyond that is the main treatment area with new, cloth covered recliners and metal bag hangers, some TV’s and magazine racks.
Anyway, so you go back there and hand them your paper work and they sit you down, ask you a bunch of questions and stab you with an iv. In my case, I have a port, which is really good because that will help to preserve my veins in the wake of the toxic chemicals that are supposedly going to cure me, and when they put the iv in my port, they call it “tapping the port,” what they do is they have this fat needle with this thimble like top with wings that they insert with a harsh stabbing motion. Now when I say stab, I mean they push that thing in hard, and I am pretty certain that the nurse that “tapped my port” the first time has never had a port or known anyone who has had a port, because when I asked if it hurt, she said that it would be a pinch because it was going through skin, but that wasn’t a pinch, that was a stabbing pain, and it burned… oh did it burn.. it was like the needle was coated in acid, lemon juice and salt all at the same time, and it hurts when the port gets pushed on anyway, and they pushed hard!
After they “tap the port” they drip the premeds – saline and steroids – through the iv. That takes about an hour.
Next is the Adriamycin (Doxorubicin), which is red and comes in two very large syringes. It is slow pushed in by a nurse over the course of about 20 minutes while saline is simultaniously dripped in from a bag. They have to do it slow and dilute it because it’s very irritating on the veins.
Then they hook up the Cytoxan. It slow drips from a bag for a little over an hour, again with the slowness because it’s harsh on the veins.
The last thing they do is flush it all in with more saline, and then use a syringe to inject some blood thinner so the port doesn’t clog up, then more saline to flush that in.
By the time I left I was exhausted and within two hours of being home I crawled into bed and stayed there for the rest of the day and night. There is no way to describe what my body was experiencing other than to say that it felt like I’d had poison slow dripped into my veins over the course of a couple of hours. It was a kind of masochistic slow torture that went against my every instinct.
