9. I've decided my chest port is a POS. Necessary, yes; functional, barely. Today I wound up nearly upside down with one arm above my head before the LPN could get a blood return from my port. And since today would involve a chemo infusion, a functional port was pretty much essential.
10. I was reminded today why I like early morning appointments at the SCCA. In the morning, things are still running on time. You show up at 7:00 for the blood draw, which takes fifteen minutes, then head to your 8:00 consult forty-five minutes early. But the clinic is still running on-time (or ahead) and so you get to see your provider a little early. And the pattern continues. But when you start at 1:00 in the afternoon, all bets are off. Everything's now running behind and that hour they've allotted for a twenty minute process winds up not being enough.
11. When it's only been a week since you've seen your oncologist, there's not much to talk about with anyone else. Got to see a new nurse practitioner today, who was very nice, but there wasn't really much to talk about.
12. This will probably make me sound irredeemably sexist, but I still find it incredibly weird to talk about the shit (literally) you have to deal with as a colon cancer patient with a woman who's probably ten to twenty years younger than me. It's weird enough talking about it with an older guy. Ah well, as I've said before, the first thing colon cancer kills is your dignity.
13. Ah, the infusion. I'd done my best to forget what chemo infusions are like. Previously, I got a big bag of saline and a small bag of Avastin. On good days, they'd run them simultaneously; on bad, in sequence. But even in sequence it was only ninety minutes. Today I got the saline (or it might've been swapped for dextrose), the Avastin, the irinotecan, and three different other drugs to battle the effects of the irinotecan. Tough a few of these didn't take long, only two were given in parallel. My infusions are back up to four or five hours.
14. Two more words that don't belong together: "anal" and "burning." As the nurse was queueing up one of the brief infusions after pushing a couple of other drugs, BIL4 and I asked her about the choices between pushes (where they load a syringe, attach it your port, and just push the drug in) versus infusions (bags attached to your port hooked to a machine that slowly causes them to drip). We learned that all of the additional drugs could be given via syringe, and that some nurses at the SCCA woudl push all three, but that she preferred to give the one as an infusion since, when pushed, it had the potential side effect of causing "anal burning." She'd seen that once, and had no interest seeing that again. BIL4 and I very quickly agreed with her decision.
15. During the infusion, I received "education" on irinotecan, which, per the educator, is apparently known in the biz by the euphemism "i run to the can." I've already addressed the side effect of fatal diarrhea, so I'll just add that I can apparently once again look forward to looking like I've got mange. Like oxaliplatin, irinotecan won't cause all your hair to fall out, but it will cause it to thin. Joy. I'm not so vain that I really care, but I am vain enough that I don't want my beard to get so thin that I can actually see my face. Haven't seen it in 20+ years, and don't particularly have any reason to see it now.
16. SCCA has two flavors of infusion cubes: one that has a curtain and a reclining chair, and one that has a sliding door, reclining chair, and hospital bed. The first time I got one of the latter I felt weird about the bed and so sat in the chair. Not any more. They give me a bed, I'm lying down.
17. It's probably psychosomatic, or maybe the pre-scan lack of sleep, but the chemo infusion made me tired. Once the education part of the afternoon was over, I pretty much slept through the rest of it (except when the nurses needed me to acknowledge my name and birth date.) I do know that at one point one of the nurses came in and turned off the lights as both BIL4 and I were sleeping.
18, Last, but not least, I'm back on the Xeloda/capecitabine. By my calculations, I should be taking my last dose right about the time I'm getting on a plan in Budapest to come home.
Speaking of which...
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