They told me each chemo treatment would get progressively worse. So I was bracing myself for it - but pleasantly surprised that Chemo #5 actually hit me harder than this last one - Yahoo!! I was even able to make it to Lance's best friend, Ron's wedding last Saturday. I really wasn't expecting to feel good enough to go. I' m sure glad I was able to attend!
I met with my radiation Dr. the day before my last chemo. Dr. Sase (sause) is a very compassionate doctor. He's really good at reassuring me that everything will be OK. The radiation tech's zeroed in on the area to be radiated, lining up the lasers and then marking me with about eight tiny tatoo dots so they will be able to line the lasers up for each treatment correctly. And yes, I'd say six of the eight tatoo dots hurt!! However, that area may be a little on the sensitive side.
We also set the schedule for my radiation treatments. I need 24 treatments and they said it works best if they are consecutive weeks. Our family vacation falls right in the middle of the radiation schedule. I had booked the vacation before all this started and I can't change the dates. So the radiation is M-F for five weeks starting July 23rd-Aug. 24th with a day off for July 24th. The Dr. felt this would work best considering our vacation, the afternoon appt. time slot I prefer, etc. Otherwise, I would have had to start the treatments right away and wouldn't feel very good on our vacation. So, by waiting, I will have about seven weeks to recover from the chemo before starting the radiation treatments. I was hesitant to agree to this at first, because I so want to get this done right away. But I had a few minutes in the radiation tube to think about it and everything pointed to doing it later. And I'm excited to start feeling better soon!!!
I emailed Mary to see how she is doing and asked her to let me know how much of the side effects had started to subside as it's been about five weeks since her last chemo. She said her taste had come back 100% - I so can't wait for that!! That is one of the hardest parts of this cuz nothing tastes normal or good! And I absolutely mean NOTHING!!!!! And yet you have to force yourself to eat to gain any strength back, AND it makes you GAIN weight! Even Mary was bummed at the weight gain but she said she's already lost almost half of it - Yay, way to go!! The neuropathy, though, had still not decreased for her. This is like nerve damage to your toes, feet, fingers and hands. Makes it hard to find shoes that don't hurt, hard to walk much, hard to button shirts, etc. I'm currently taking additional med's to mask this, which has made it tolerable enough to wear shoes to work but hard to do much walking around. The doctors say it can take several months for this to go away or it can be permanent. So I'm hoping as the weeks go by it will decrease in severity but I'll have to wait and see. Luckily, I can still type without much discomfort - just lost of errors!
Thanks for reading this blog - I love to read your comments!
Nancy
