All about chemo

If you don`t like needles, you are stuffed when it comes to having chemotherapy! 

First off I had epirubicin, which is a bright red coloured liquid that colours your wee bright red and can give you quite a fright if you are not warned about it happening! Some people have been known to think they are bleeding to death apparently, just because the nurse who gave the drug forgot to mention it would happen! I had an iv needle inserted into a vein in my hand and the drug was then pushed slowly into my body courtesy of a nurse with a huge syringe full of the stuff who sat in front of me. It probably took around 30 to 40 minutes for the drugs to be administered, I had mine mid morning and by mid evening I was being sick again and again. I was given anti sickness drugs but that first time they did not work properly, in the end I had to have the district nurse to give me injections over the course of 5 days to prevent my being sick every hour. They leave a 3 week gap between treatment, I think that is probably because you are so ill that your body simply could not take it any sooner. By the time the second session came around my hair was all but gone and I had the rest shaved off to stop it being found on the floor all around the house!

After you finish a few months of Epirubicin you then get to have a different type of drug, yipee! I had CFS, administered this time by a drip, again into an iv in the back of my hand, it took about an hour or so to go through. Again I had anti sickness medication, but this time I also had to take an antidote! Apparently if you forget to take the antidote the drugs just carry on working! Presumably they could then kill you! Nice. So on a certain day, at a certain time, and it must be the same time that you had the drug and so many hours later, you have to be precise, even waking in the night to take your tablet, you take small white tablets to counteract the effect of the poison the medics have filled your body with! Another few months, a treatment every two weeks for two weeks, and you finally get to the end of your chemotherapy. It took, in all, 7/8 months and in the middle I was having radiotherapy too, just to make things more complicated, and more difficult! So I started my chemotherapy in March and finished at the end of October 2005.  I thought it was all over, apart from taking tamoxifen for up to 5 years and having regular appointments to see surgeon and oncologist. Then I had lab results back from the hospital to say I had to have herceptin - a drug which then was not approved by NICE.  I thought I would have a fight on my hands, just as quite a few other women had been doing, their plights highlighted on tv as they asked, sometimes begged, for the medication that we should all have been entitled to, but which unfortunately not everybody got. I was on of the lucky ones, and many many thanks to those women who fought for the drugs. On the morning I was told,yes, you can have the herceptin, we heard on the radio that it was approved for everybodys use. So after Christmas 2006, yes it took all that time to find out if I was HER2 positive and if I needed herceptin, I started on the treatment. A year it took, backwards and forwards to the hospital, something I thought was finished, for another 12 months, iv needle in the back of my hand, herceptin administered by drip over the course of first of all, at least 3 hours, but which was speeded up after a while, so we got it down to an hour and a half. The nurses could not give it to me any quicker, they had to do it slowly incase of bad side effects. The first treatment I had, for which I was at hospital all day, I passed out! I had started to feel a bit odd, found that I felt freezing cold, I could feel myself getting further and further away in my head, if that makes sense, and the next thing I know the nurses were waking me up, checking my blood pressure and looking very worried. Thankfully that only happened the once while on the treatment, though I did have to have regular heart scans, once a month, because it can affect the heart and they needed to find out if I was okay. Towards the end of my treatment I did wonder if I would need to have a line inserted, I think they put one into the main artery/vein or something similar, which you have to keep clean and which has to be flushed out, it is into your chest/neck area so I did not fancy that at all, not only can you see it at all times, you have to be very careful not to knock it or catch it. My veins were almost all gone when I reached the end of the chemotherapy, so I am surprised they held up for the herceptin, but they did, thanks to the skill of the nurses inserting the iv line, even though they sometimes needed to have 2, 3 or even on one memorable occasion 4 tries at inserting it, my hand often black and blue in the process. I would need to warm my hand, and I could only use the one hand, the other was on the side that I had the operation to remove the cancer and you are not allowed to have anything sharp go near that arm incase you have lymphoma, and so I would have my gloves on to go to the hospital in the hope that my hand would be warm enough for them to find my vein, inevitably I would have to sit for a while with a warm lavender bag on, trying to warm it up even more. Time consuming business chemotherapy!