The truth about chemo.

If you came here hoping to read wild conspiracy theories about how chemotherapy is a tool meant to keep the sick sick, you've come to the wrong place. The "truth" in the title of this post refers to what going through chemotherapy treatment is really like, from one person's experience.

Going through chemotherapy involves setting a lot of alarms. It involves taking a lot of pills. It involves eating a lot of beige food. It hopefully does not involve a lot of vomiting, if the load of pills you've taken are doing the job they are meant to do. 

People going through cancer treatment are often depicted as sickly and pale, with sunken eyes and a scarf around their bald head. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't people who look like this when they go through treatment, because it really does a number on you, but this just seems like the extreme version. 

The truth is, a round of chemo doesn't end once they disconnect the IV and send you home. It doesn't even end when you begin to feel better. You are constantly dealing with the effects of chemo. People who go through cancer treatment deal with the effects of it for the rest of their lives, even after going into remission.

For me, chemotherapy looks like this:

Every other Friday, I go to the hospital, get my blood drawn, visit my oncologist, then get sent down to the chemotherapy floor and shown to my chair. 

At Northwestern Memorial, you get your own little private room, which is nice. However, there are no windows, so it can feel sort of claustrophobic and stuffy. At the Vince Lombardi Cancer Center in Green Bay, there is a beautiful wall of windows looking out over some nicely manicured shrubbery, but you don't get any privacy, so if you end up throwing up during infusion (like I did once!) everybody can see you until the nurse comes to pull a curtain closed around you. 

The nurse gives me a warm blanket and usually a bag of chips and apple juice (because I am a 6 year old girl) and then begins administering the pre-meds, which includes an anti-nausea med and a steroid (to help the anti-nausea meds work better). The steroid gives me a simultaneous wave of nausea, and a brief tingly-burning sensation in my hoo-ha. The nurses call this "fire crotch". 

Once the pharmacy finishes preparing my drugs, the nurse gives me a shot of Benadryl straight into my veins. They give me Benadryl because one of the drugs, called Irinotican (pronounced ih-REE-no-TEE-can) causes my eyelids to twitch like crazy and the back of my throat to feel numb. The Benadryl helps stop these both from happening. It makes me very loopy and silly and helps me sleep through most of the infusion. I will usually FaceTime my parents before the Benadryl hits, and when it hits, I am usually asleep within minutes. 

I receive 3 drugs over the course of about 2 hours. There are so many fluids going into my body that I have to get up to pee every 10 minutes (or at least that's what it feels like). 

Once I've been infused with all the allotted poison, I get to take home a sexy, black fanny pack with another drug in it, that runs for the next 46 hours. The drug runs through a pump, which is a boxy, grey machine that makes a little zzzzip noise every time it releases a little bit of chemo into my body. 

On Sunday, after a lot of sleeping, a nurse comes to my apartment to disconnect me from the pump. Her name is Michelle and she's really nice. 

And that's it. That's the whole process. Do I hate it? Yes. Does it keep me alive? Also yes. 

Sometimes even just thinking about chemo, any aspect of the process, makes me feel nauseous. There are smells that trigger nausea, like certain trees in my neighborhood that somehow smell like sterile hospital supplies. I have to stop and cover my nose, and breathe through my mouth for a second until the wave subsides. 

I have to be wary of what I eat when I have the pump on me, because if I end up vomiting, that food comes back up, and it ....does not taste good. Which in turn makes me not want to eat that food anymore, so if it's a food I really love, it taints (heh) that food for me forever.

When I was receiving treatment in Green Bay, I was getting a different drug called Oxaliplatin, which caused severe numbness in my fingers and throat. If I touched something really cold with my bare hands, it would hurt, like a shock. If I drank or ate something cold, it would feel like my throat was closing up - it wasn't, but it would feel like it. I never experienced that one, because once they told me about that side effect, I never wanted to even risk it.

If I went out in the cold (which in the Midwest, is very hard to avoid), I had to wear warm gloves and a scarf to cover my face. If I was outside for a few minutes, my hands would go full on numb. If I didn't wear socks and walked on hardwood floors inside, my feet would sting.

I still deal with the effects of Oxaliplatin - my fingers are still slightly numb. For a very long time, it was difficult for me to open safety seals - like the kinds that protect most jars and bottles when you first buy them. Or a plastic container full of cupcakes - couldn't open those by myself for a while. (I know that makes it sound like I buy a lot of cupcakes....but it's just an example....? Don't judge.)

The worst part about chemo is that it takes up two whole weekends of each month. I'm working on switching the schedule around a bit, but it's still 3 days of feeling like ass every 2 weeks. 

I will likely be on this treatment plan forever. My treatment plan is non-curative, meaning the goal is not to cure the disease, but to treat it. 

Sometimes if I think about it for too long, I get angry with myself for not somehow catching the cancer sooner. Like maybe if I had noticed something was off sooner, they would have caught it at Stage 3, and I would have a curative treatment plan. They would have treated me with chemo and shrunk the tumors, and then removed them surgically, and I'd be all set. But instead, I'm non-curative. Stage 4. Terminal.

I try not to go down that rabbit hole. But it's difficult to come out of once you've ventured too far. 

Chemotherapy is also the main thing that is keeping me from performing. But more on that to come.