Day 44, Wednesday, March 13th, 2013

I didn't puke.

Not exactly a Pulitzer-winning opening line, but when you've been getting chemo, that is gold star stickers, fanfare, a ticker-tape parade (do they still do those?), and Bob Barker saying, "A new car!" all rolled into one. [You know, I've never actually seen an episode of The Price is Right since Drew Carey started hosting it. Is he any good? I mean, I've seen a couple of clips. Drew's lost a lot of weight and is even carrying the same microphone. It's like there's a Bob Barker mold that he has to sleep in at night.]

I got Ondancetron (on prancetron, on donner, on blitzen..tron) as my primary anti-nauseant, and, as with previous rounds of chemotherapy, it, by its lonesome, was insufficient for the task at hand. So they gave me Compazine (trade name; actual name - prochlorperazine) as a top-up, which only comes in pill-form these days, which, if you're having nausea, seems counter-intuitive, but nausea meds are best given as a prophylactic, anyway. I am now attempting to picture some sort of stomach condom. If you detect the stirrings of nausea in your digestive regions, the sooner you take something for it, the better it will work. The inverse of that is also true - the more you need to throw up, the worse the meds are going to handle it. As such, one becomes rather adept at picking up the spoor of the wild nausea beast, as it makes its way through the underbrush and hidden trails of the tummy.

I've always sort of wondered at the logic of rebranding a drug that has a complicated name with another that is less descriptive (at least from an organic chemist's point of view). Why not call it Nev-R-Barf? It would at least get the point across to the layman.

The Compazine was good enough, until I woke up at three am, with it having worn off entirely. Luckily I was woken up by the beeps of my personal science trolley, letting me know that it was out of a fluid that it liked, rather than by an immediate and pressing need to evacuate my contents through the wrong end. This gave me time to press the button that alerts a nurse to my having a need that falls under their jurisdiction. The night nurse was a very friendly lady named Casey, and she procured for me another compazine. When that proved insufficient, I got intravenous Ativan (trade name; actual name - lorazepam), which worked great. It also knocked me quite out, which was nice, since hospitals aren't actually very good places to rest up. There are periodic checks for vitals throughout the night, and they need a blood sample early every morning.

That brings us to morning. I had more nausea, and got more ativan as requested. They start you off on a miniscule dose, just 0.2 milligrams, but are quite quick to ramp you up if necessary. I needed more, but topped of at the dizzying heights of 0.5 milligrams, which was pleasantly effective. Mom came by for a visit, the doctors did their rounds, I ate several times, and then I mostly slept through my chemo.

The second round went even easier than the first, with the nausea well controlled by the Ativan.

In fact, the only annoying thing was that I had to pee about every half an hour, because of the constant stream of IV fluids that they run through me, for that exact purpose. Cyclophosphamide can cause some horrendous bladder problems, and in the old days of chemo, you basically didn't get to sleep while you were getting it because you were drinking as much water as you could, on top of intravenous fluids, to keep it from sitting in your bladder for any length of time, combined with one of those doodle catheters I mentioned a few days ago, through which your bladder is irrigated. It is in a massively thankful state of mind that I get to say that now, you get Mesna (actual name - mesnex), a synthetic sulfhydryl compound that, in this case, protects said bladder. You still have a lot of fluids run through you, but it ain't so bad. You pee a lot, but there is no longer a screaming agony kill me now angle to it.

Because chemo used to be so scary, that's generally still the way it is presented in TV an movies, and that's sad, I think, because it scares people when they're already in a scary situation. I'm going on record: modern chemotherapy is nowhere near as horrible as it's cracked up to be. I've felt worse from the flu. Granted, most of that is because of wonderful advances in wonderful, wonderful drugs, but still - the message here is that it is actually quite tolerable. Even compared to ten years ago, to five years ago, the change is drastic.

"Quoth the raven, 'Boo, you whore.'"