A Quick Review of this Round -- and a Preview of the Next

I'm now five days past chemo, and am (more or less) back to normal. Well, cancer normal anyway. Thus, it seems an appropriate time to provide a quick, high-level rundown on how things went this time:

Thursday, 2:00 pm -- Chemo starts

Thursday, 5:00 pm -- Exhaustion starts

Thursday, 5:30 pm -- Gastrointestinal distress starts (then repeats on about a 2 hour frequency)

Thursday, 6:30 pm -- Leave the SCCA

Thursday, 9:00 pm -- First attempt to go to bed

Friday, 1:00 am -- Completely give up on sleep

Friday, 7:00 am -- Make another attempt at sleep

Friday, 11:00 am -- Move from the bed to the chair

Friday, 1:00 pm -- Move back to the bed; continue the wandering migration from bed to couch to chair for the next 7 hours

*** 

Friday, 11:00 pm -- Take trazodone, go to bed

Saturday, 2:00 am -- Learn that gastrointestinal distress trumps trazodone

Saturday, 5:00 am -- Try the couch again

Saturday, 6:00 am -- Or maybe the bed

Saturday, 1:00 pm -- Hey, I must've fallen asleep. Finally!

Saturday, 4:30 pm -- Meet a friend for a drink and snack so as to force a need to leave the house

+++

Saturday, 6:00 pm -- Bed, chair, couch for the next eighteen hours; somewhere in there sleep happens

Sunday, 3:00 pm -- Go to Sib2's house to watch the Superbowl

Sunday, 9:00 pm -- Come home, do not much of anything

Sunday, 11:00 pm -- Go to bed

Monday, 6:30 am -- Get up and go to work

In short, it was a slog. Exhausted, miserable, unable to sleep, uninterested in eating, frequent hellish trips to the bathroom. Five days in and I'm still reeling, but I could at least approximate a normal day's activity. 

But here's where it gets interesting. Today the SCCA sent me the schedule for the next round. I knew it was going to have to be close to my departure for Sydney, but seeing it in writing makes me wonder how carefully I thought this through. 

Those three asterisks up there? At roughly that point in the next cycle I'll be getting on my first plane for Los Angeles. And the three crosses? That's when I get off the plane in Sydney. Basically, I will be spending hour 24 to hour 48 of chemo on a plane. 

Erm.

In some ways, it's not really my fault. With a chemo cycle of every three weeks there's not a lot of room for travel if you're not willing to bump right up against an infusion at one end or the other -- or, in all likelihood, both. But by the same token, my frugal decision not to upgrade to business class at least for the trip down probably wasn't the wisest move in the world. It was expensive as hell, which is why I didn't do it, but it likely would've been money well spent. 

To say the least, it's going to be an interesting trip. Assuming, of course, I get through the next two and a half weeks.