Wednesday, January 17 – Infusion day

Since last week I could not say for sure if I took my morning pre-meds for chemo, this week I set all the pills out on the counter and put the bottles away as I took each pill so I would know for sure I had taken all my meds.

I got my day started at 4:30 this morning, so I anticipate it will be another early night for me, but I will still take a sleeping pill before I hit the sack. Last week I didn’t when I found myself heading to bed early and I was awake for many hours in the middle of the night.

I watched morning news and cleaned out emails before I fed the Toothless Wonder cat closer to the normal hour he gets fed, and then came in and started getting ready for my infusion. Showered, dressed, packed my bag, made sure all my electronics were charged and my knitting put together and ate lunch a wee bit early. Applied my temp tattoo for this week and we headed out the door.

We arrived early as usual, but this has turned out to work in my favor as for the last 5 weeks my ANC – a type of white blood cell that is critical for fighting infections has been low on my weekly blood work, along with all my other blood counts, but this is one they really watch. For the past 5 weeks in a row I’ve had to have a finger prick done at the in house lab to re-check my blood counts to insure specifically my ANC has recovered enough for me to have another infusion that will knock it back down again.

Every week we have to wait while they recheck all my blood counts and then get called back to Infusion to find out if chemo is actually a go. So far so good. Example – today the blood draw yesterday had my ANC at 0.5. Should be somewhere in the range of 1.3 to 7.4. So yeah, just a little low. Today from the finger prick of blood sample my ANC and improved to 2.6.

This week my infusion nurse was Jamie, and when she was getting my IV hooked up into my port she said Dr. Sikaria had sent a nice note about me in my file. When I asked her what Dr. Sikaria had said Jamie told me it was about my tumor and how well it is responding to chemo and she is so happy with our progress and she thanked the infusion team for their good work. Jamie was glad I only had to do the Taxol today.

Mr. S was sitting across from me in infusion room 1, between him Victoria and I we started up a conversation about our chemos. Mr. S is on Taxol as well as a few others for lung cancer, his second bout. Victoria is on something else, she had colon cancer in 2015 and it has now metastasized to her liver and lungs. She gets hooked up to pump at the end of her infusions with another drug and gets infused with this drug over the next 48+ hours. She returns on Friday morning to have the pump IV removed and give back the pump. I have also seen Victoria at the Cancer Support Community. She attends a support group there for Young Adults with Cancer on the same night Hubby and I attend our Support Groups.

Victoria will start losing her hair in the next week or so, and she’s worried about how she will look. Mr. S and I tried to tell her its ok, hair is not who you are; you can still show your beautiful self without hair. I took off my scarf to show her it’s not nearly as bad as she thinks it will be. Mr. S agreed, and we told her she might want to shave her head once it does start falling out. Mr. S agreed as he said he couldn’t take the itching from the hair shedding. I told him how I felt like I had a hair trim for 3 weeks while my stubble fell out. My neck was constantly itchy. Mr. S and I both have a little bit of hair left on the nape of our necks and we still have some eyebrows left. I even still have some eyelashes!

We shall see what tomorrow brings; maybe I will not be as tired and spaced out as I have been these past weeks.

Life is supporting others