A Trip to the Oncology Clinic

I had my first chemo treatment this morning.

You show up and sign in, and then you're encouraged to sit wherever you want. There is a large open room with about 25 black leather recliners arranged in it, each one with its own IV stand and portable cabinet of sharp stuff. You can bring in whatever you feel like - blanket, food, book, iPod - but this time I mostly read what they gave me, a set of extremely ominous articles about the drugs in question (one of them, did you know, is chemically related to mustard gas? Two of them were classed as "irritants" and the other two were classed as "vesicants", AKA "blister agents", and all were said to cause gross damage if they got out of the vein...

But not to worry, I guess; it's just more of the boilerplate. They hook up the IV to the port and flush it out with a snog of saline, then they run a little bag of some anti-nausea drug and some steroid that's apparently helpful in a general way. Then comes the first chemo drug, a large bag of toxicity that takes about an hour to run. After that comes another bag of saline, then they push two small syringes of two additional chemo drugs in. Then comes a large syringe of some red fluid; it's plenty toxic and they actually time how long they take to push it in; too fast and it can get nasty.

Then there's more saline, a final hosing-out of the port with heparin, and you're free to go. Total elapsed time, about two hours, not even enough to nibble my caramel popcorn.

I didn't feel a thing the whole time I was there. I didn't know what to expect. Immediate retching? Burning heat in my veins? A sudden desire to belt out songs from Oklahoma!? But really, I didn't feel anything at all. Side-effect-wise, the worst thing was having the tape ripped off my chest when the IV came out.

I went home and took a rather long nap, and when I awakened, I felt for all the world like someone was sitting on me. Someone fairly big and heavy too, Magnus ver Magnussen or someone of that sort. The sensation was very much like waking up and realizing that one has come down with something without knowing what it was. I felt heavy, slow, lethargic and drained, and since that's how I've felt for the last month, well, it's hard to say that I felt any worse.

Now, about 12 hours after the chemo, I detect the first leading edge of nausea. I was watching LSU destroy Georgia Tech in the Whatever-It-Was Bowl (I'm bad at remembering bowl names) when something somehow made me very queasy, and it was obvious that the TV was making it a lot worse. So I downed a nausea pill and got the hell away from the TV, and thus far my nausea is tolerable. I don't think I'll be eating anything for a while though...

Now here's the interesting observation. By far the most bothersome symptom I've had, far and away worse than just "feeling bad", was the agonizing pain my left lower back, left groin, left hip and left groin (left kidney to left knee, roughly). It was for this pain that I was taking Percocet about as fast as the instructions permitted, and it was this pain that made me think "Oh my God, how am I ever going to go back to work? This is impossible! This is going to require either a medical leave or unprecedented quantities of painkillers, and neither one is really good!"

But for whatever reason, that pain is gone. Not reduced, but gone. Did the steroid tamp down some inflammatory process associated with the tumors? Are the tumors themselves shrinking, or "debulking", as they apparently like to say? I don't know. All I do know is that if this is really a lasting consequence of chemotherapy, I'm going to have to put chemotherapy down in my book as a legitimate medical miracle no matter how fiddlesome the process is.

That's the news on this, the last day of the year.