Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Chemo Day 1

It is 9:30 PM now and I just woke up from 3 hour nap. I'm a bit groggy so if some of this writing is strange, I apologize in advance.
Today was interesting. At 8:00 AM Angela and I showed up at the Heartland fertility clinic to see if we could convince them to take a sperm deposit on such extreme short notice. One of the side effects of chemo is the possibility of sterilization, and even though Angela and I were not planning to have children, we thought that nobody knows anything about our future these days. Unfortunately they needed more time than one hour for blood test etc. and just couldn't 'squeeze' us in (pun intended). Ah well, we tried.
After that I started my very first chemo treatment at 9:30 AM. I spent most of the day in a very comfortable big reclining chair attached to an IV. I received multiple bags full of liquids, including pre-chemo medications like benadryl, salt water solutions to flush things out and the actual chemo drugs. There are 4 major chemo drug options and they gave me all 4 . Bring it on!
The treatment ended at 4:00 PM and I had a pretty good day of napping, watching a movie on my laptop and getting soup, cookies and orange juice served regularly. The whole thing felt like traveling first class on a plane. I admit it, it was fun.
When the nurse pointed out after a couple of hours that they would now administer the first chemo drug I expected some kind of a fanfare or magic reaction. I pictured Gollum with 'It burnzz, it burnzz!" but nothing out of the ordinary happened.
Angela picked me up and after getting some drugs at the drugstore and some Dairy Queen, we went home to have supper and to rest. Overall I feel(t) quite good. A little sleepy but otherwise well. I definitely braced myself for more. They gave me drugs to prevent me from getting nauseous and so far they seem to work.

So there is it: Today I got chemo. Weird. Like somebody saying 'today you gave birth' . The kind of experience I thought I would never have.


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