A More Technical Explanation

I'm feeling a decent amount better, thanks to the anti-nausea drugs my husband has been pumping into me, so I decided I should work on filling you in about how the first session actually went.

We arrived at the office around 10:55am and I walked to the lab to get my bloodwork done.  After waiting for almost 30 minutes for a 30 second poke, we finally meandered upstairs to Dr. Knechtl's office.  I had to fill out a sheet that told them how I was feeling for the day (any pain, nausea, anxiety, etc..) and on it I vaguely explained my ear situation.  My nurse, Terri, was a little uncomfortable with the whole experience so she rang for Dr. Knechtl.  He came and examined me, poked around in both ears, felt for swelling in my lymph nodes in my neck, and then asked Isaac and I a bunch of questions before decided we should still be good to go.

After getting the okay, Terri loaded up an arsenal of stuff and came over to get my IV started.  Literally, an arsenal.  She had the Huber needle to go in my port (see pic on the left), several pieces of gauze, a blue sterile pad, a sterilizing swab, numbing spray, a bag of Decadron already connected to an IV, a couple syringes of saline, and a syringe of Aloxi.  Once she'd kind of set her stuff up on the table connected to my chair, she started by sterilizing my chest where the port is.  I thought that was cold, until she told me she was going to use a cold numbing spray on me so I couldn't feel the needle go in.

That stuff was COLD!  It felt like she was spraying liquid nitrogen on my chest until it turned into a piece of ice-skin.  I think if I would have taken a little hammer to it, that part of my skin would have cracked open like a thin sheet of glass.  Anyway, then I had to take a deep breath in and hold it so that there was tension on my skin and she could have easier access to my port.  I was so scared it was going to be excruciating--you should see the size of the needle!

Turns out that numbing stuff works pretty well because all I felt was a little pressure on my skin and then it was in.  It took maybe half a second.  Not too shabby.  Then started all the stuff.  First was the anti-nausea drugs: Decadron and Aloxi.  The Decadron is a more short-term anti-nausea drug while the Aloxi is designed to last about 36 hours.  After the Decadron was all in, they started an IV of saline and then we did a test batch of Bliomycin.  Apparently this stuff is rough on your lungs and if you have an allergic reaction to it, it will shut down your airways and you'll get hives.  Thankfully I didn't react to it.

We waited for an hour before they were comfortable that I hadn't reacted to the Blio.  Then Terri came back over with another large batch of stuff.  The first one was Adriamycin.  It looks like red Kool-aid.  She put around 80cc's of that in over a period of 10 minutes.  Then we flushed my port with saline.  Then it was Blio's turn again.  This time she put it probably 50cc's of it over about a 20 minute period.  I'm glad that they take their time with these things.  I've read on the internet that if they push it into you too fast, it can be extremely uncomfortable!

After the Blio came the Vinblastine.  I can't remember how much of this went in, but it was pretty uneventful.  Oh--and we flushed my port in between ever single drug.  Needless to say I had to pee about a couple hours into it.  After that, they started me on the last one... the "D" drug.  Can't remember what it was because although I've only been up for an hour, I'm feeling exhausted already.  I'm going to check out for a while and I'll hop back on later to finish this.

********NAP********

Okay, so I actually took like, three naps during that time.  BUT, the upside of that is that I ate a half a pizza.  Which is good, because I didn't keep barely anything down last night.  Back to the story though...

After the "D" drug, which dripped for about an hour, she flushed me with some more saline and Herapin, a blood thinner.  After that, she pulled the needle out and I was good to go.  It was 4pm.  Isaac was nice enough to stop at Wendy's for me so I could grab a Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger because I was hungry.  Unfortunately, I think I got sick from it and I don't think I'll be eating one of those again.

The rest of the night was not ideal, as you can probably tell from my previous post.