#5

Yesterday was treatment #5 – a new set of chemo drugs and the first round of Herceptin treatment. During treatment presented itself with a few challenges, but overall, I am fairing pretty well.

It started when my needle was put into my port-a-cath. It had never hurt, in fact, I’d barely ever felt it before. But this time was painful. Like really painful. Like close your eyes, squeeze your fists and try to bare it painful. It died down after a few minutes, but boy did that hurt – and it slowed down my first saline drip as the nurse wanted to monitor me.

Next up was the Herceptin. For the first time it needs to be put through the IV over 1.5 hours (as opposed to 1 hour next time), then I needed to sit there for 1 hour and just wait while they monitored me to see how well I would tolerate the drug.

After that, I received the next chemo drug – Docetaxal. I had to put cold gloves on my hands (picture oven mitts with little ice packs inside) to try and constrict the blood vessels to my fingers. This might help prevent my nails from failing off or having pain in my fingers. We switched out the gloves part way through the treatment to ensure they stayed cold.

Well the second set of gloves was freezing. Like unbearably freezing. My hands were so cold and it was so painful. I tried so hard to suck it up for as long as I could, but my hands just could not take it. I squeezed my eyes and tears slowly started to come out….and I still had around 40 minutes of glove time to go! I kept telling myself it was better than not having any finger nails, but man it was unbearable.

I was allowed to take my hands out for a few seconds to warm them up a tiny bit, but then back into the gloves. It got better as the gloves thawed out, but holy cow, talk about cold. My one pinky finger is still a little number – frostbite maybe? Anyways, it is better than not having nails, so I just need to prepare my body for that ‘insult’ next go around.

I also need to continue taking the injections to help stimulate white blood counts. This time I will start on Day 3 and have 4 days of injections. Good news is, I can do 2 at home from some of my favourite health professionals (aka FRIENDS!) Bad new - we will be in San Francisco for 2 of the treatments so I might just have to do it myself…eeks….maybe I can sweet talk Cayley into doing it for me ;)

Other than that, the side-effects from this treatment are a little more tolerable. I’m constantly hungry due to the steroids in the medication I need to take for this one. It also makes my stomach a little upset, but not really nauseous so that is good. And some small headaches and muscle aches but nothing too too bad.

5 down, 3 to go. Over the hump!