When In Doubt, Rewind
New round of chemo started this afternoon.
They’re going to be doing 1-liter bags of fluid (containing 400mg of Etoposide in each) as a 3-hour drip, repeating them for approximately 36 hours. As I type this, the second bag is nearly finished.
Then there’ll be a 12-hour break. Sometime early Saturday afternoon, the other chemo med, Cyclophosphamide, will be done on a 2-hour drip for three days in a row.
These are heavy-duty meds, with a lot of risk of side-effects including nausea (particularly with the second one), problems in the GI-tract (the full route from your mouth to out your butt), and other things. They don’t know which, if any, I’ll end up having, but they have to tell me about them. (And I feel better knowing, really, even though it also takes some effort to convince myself that I shouldn’t expect everything to happen.)
They said this course of treatment will be different from my earlier ones, which had similar potential possible side-effects. I was lucky and had very few.
Once they’re done, we wait for a few weeks with my numbers starting back down at the minimum/zero amounts.
Crazy timing
Needless to say, we didn’t expect things to go this way. We knew I’d have to come in for another round of treatment, but the level required, and the manifestation of the leukemia cells, were both a shock.
This means some things won’t be able to happen as much as I’d been hoping. We thought there was a chance I’d still be at home into next week. Some close friends of ours from California will be staying with us next week as part of a trip they’re doing. We knew when originally coordinating the visit that there’d be a decent chance I wouldn’t get to see them at home, but the hope was still there that I’d be able to hang out with them. Can’t do much about it, of course—I’ll get to see them a little bit assuming I’m in decent shape next week. Knowing Elana will get to have a lot of time to chat with them is a big plus. And I know our boys will have a lot of fun playing with their two daughters, who they’ve not seen for a couple of years.
