I am still alive, I have survived the first week of chemo, but I’m not going to lie, it wasn’t easy. Sorry for the radio silence, this is the first time I’ve been able to put thoughts together. It’s been a big week or so, so let me start at the beginning. I’ll try and piece together my foggy memories and chemo brain thoughts in a couple of instalments.

Day 1 of chemo was….
Wait for it….
Easy!! Fun!!
I wasn’t not holding out hope that it would all be like that of course, I knew it would get worse as time goes on (and my next drug in a few weeks is a lot more intensive I believe). But I had all the excitement of first time things and seeing The Cotton Rooms. They deserve their own post but more on that later.

They gave me two drugs – Doxorubicin and Cisplatin which slowly drips into me from Tuesday to Friday, as well as a 3L pack of water each day. Wanna see how cool I look?

Amazing, I know. That’s Clarence Eugene in the background by the way, my little cow. He comes with me. Anyway, that’s one big backpack of water, and two little bags filled with chemo. They pump into me for 24 hours a day, and I go back to the hospital each day to get a new water and Cisplatin. The pumps make odd noises. One sounds like someone dialling a number on one of those old phones with the number dials that you spin around. The other one sounds like a camera taking a photo on long exposure.

I hit a bit of a wall at about 10pm on the first day. I had a few pains about the place which of course I was a bit worried were related but it wasn’t in any areas near where anything that was going on so I just decided to go to sleep.

I woke up in the morning not feeling great, and I’d had some super weird heart palpitations during the night. Eek. But I wasn’t too bothered. I went in to the hospital at midday and I was beginning to be in a bit of pain in the right hand side of my chest. They were worried that the PICC line was inserted too far and was ‘tickling’ my heart. Tickling? The pain had got worse and my chest was feeling quite tight and sore whenever the drugs pumped in. So they took off the dressing on my arm and pulled the line out 1 cm! That hurt the new wound on my arm quite a bit, but I survived and immediately felt less stress on my chest. So that was a relief! They connected me up to another damn 3L of water and vial of cisplatin and sent me back to the Cotton Rooms.

The water is a bitch. I mean it’s great because it needs to flush out my kidneys so they don’t stop working. But obviously it makes me need to go to the bathroom all the time, as well as making me so bloated and swollen, and I have to measure and log every ml of fluid to go in or out of me!

But day two was over and I went to sleep.

More to come soon, I promise. I’m back and ready to write.