Monthly Archives: October 2010

It’s not “really” surgery…

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What I Said Then:

3 days after first receiving the news (so Thursday the 16th) we met with a surgeon to talk about getting a piece of lymph node tissue for a biopsy. It was also our 3 year wedding anniversary, not how we had originally planned to celebrate, but hey, at least we got to spend the day together!

It was at this appointment that we actually got to see the results of the CT Scan that I had 2 days earlier. The doctor walked us through what we were seeing and showed us the tumor that is in my chest. On the computer she was able to show us  hundreds of 2 dimensional images that were almost like layers and slices of my body that we could quickly scroll through. She showed us multiple angles of the right side of my chest and showed us the mass, indicating “You see this here? Yeah, there shouldn’t be anything there.”

The tumor itself is about 6 cm tall and 2 cm wide (about the size of an egg) and was the reason that I was coughing for so long. I would go take a big breath in and my lungs (and to a certain extent my trachea) would expand outward into the tumor. My body would react by thinking there was some kind irritant in the lungs and I would cough to try and get rid of it (but to no avail!). I also now understood why, when my symptoms were at their worst, that my cough was most acute when  I would lay down at night: because I have this egg falling back onto my lungs.

As I mentioned the other day, my symptoms, including the cough, have all but disappeared. But when I’m thinking about it like I am now, I start to feel that little tickle again.

The doctor explained that we were there because they needed to get a piece of diseased tissue in order to biopsy it and get a definitive answer on what we were dealing with. She said that it was something that they could do as an in-office visit using what amounts to a large needle to get a tissue sample “But, the neck is a busy place,” she said. And she would feel better doing this in an environment where there were more resources available should anything unexpected happen. Plus this way they could get the whole lymph node to ensure that there was enough for a usable sample. Translation: “this is a really simple and minor procedure, but we want to do it in the operating room just to be safe.” Great! Safety first!

Since it was now “surgery” (Pfft!) we spent about 20 minutes going over paperwork, what you can and can’t eat or drink beforehand, wash yourself with this, etc, etc. I put the word surgery in quotes because in my mind this was all really just a technicality and that in reality we were looking a quick in and out. I was pretty much thinking of this as “Drive-Thru” surgery (and even then I am still using the term “surgery” loosely).

Monday the 20th was to be the big day! But we had to get through an agonizingly long weekend, as we still hadn’t really told anybody and were started to feel a bit isolated.

When I say that we hadn’t told anybody, I mean we hadn’t told anybody. It had been almost a full week and we hadn’t told my parents or the rest of our family. My parents had left for a two-week vacation in their motor home (or RV, if you will) only a few days before my initial doctor’s appointment. For better or worse, I refused to call and deliver this news to them over the phone when they were 1200 miles away. It was a heavily debated point our house, but ultimately I decided it was my decision and would stick with my initial instincts and not ruin their vacation. We would wait the two weeks for them to get back so we could tell them in person.

It was for the sake of my whole family then that we didn’t tell my sister Tanya right away either. She was scheduled to go out and join my parents for a spell during their vacation, so we couldn’t just load her up with this bomb and send her out to spend a weekend with them. Instead we drove the “happy wagon” (as we would lovingly come to call the car when we were on our way deliver the news to people) out to my sister’s house on Sunday night when she returned home and told her the news. At some point I may see if I can convince her to write a post about what it was like to get punched in the face with news of the cancer bomb.

The next morning we checked in for the procedure (note: I’m still not calling it surgery here). There was a little more paperwork, some “change into this,” and a few lines of questioning from 2 nurses, an anesthesiologist, a surgeon, and a nurse anesthetist. Before I knew it, I looked like this, and things were suddenly getting much more serious than I had initially prepared myself for:

Lunch Lady? Or Cancer Patient?

That is probably going be a tough image for my family to see. And I’ll admit that at this point I was rapidly getting way over my head and was starting to question my choice of not having told my parents yet. If you look closely,  I think you can even seen the doubt creeping onto my face in this picture. Or maybe that’s just my crustache.

In my mind, I was still okay though as far as my decision to not tell them goes, especially since I wasn’t going under a general anesthetic (for some reason I’d decided that if I was “going under” then I would have called, as if THAT would have meant it was actually surgery). Instead I was just going to be lightly sedated while they performed the procedure under a local anesthetic.

About an hour and a half after we had arrived at the hospital, the nurse anesthetist came to get me for the big moment. As we walked he asked me what I did for a living and as it turned out he and his family are season subscribers to a local theater where I have worked regularly and that he and his family had seen me in shows there. A few quick turns later and I was suddenly in the Operating Room. And it looked just it does on TV. Holy shit. Was this really happening?

I was really only allowed to be scared for a few minutes as I was quickly relaxed by the sedation medication that went in through my IV after I had laid myself down on the table. They numbed the area around my neck and while I don’t remember too many specifics do I remember that the nurses and the doctor were talking about pretty mundane things, and the doctor told me that’s how I could know that things were going well. The nurses occasionally asked me a few questions to ensure that I was still doing well and I was. I was awake throughout, but certainly drugged and a little sleepy. I was relaxed, and in a good place as my mind wandered freely.

Just as I had expected, the procedure was short. It couldn’t have been more than about 10 minutes,  and before I knew it I was asked to slowly sit up and move into the wheel chair so that they could take me to the recovery area. I wasn’t there for more than a minute before Christine joined me. She was happy to see me and was happy to see that I was already doing very well.

I was given some food and some juice since I hadn’t eaten all day, and as Christine and I chatted I noticed that her eyes kept wandering down to my neck before snapping back up to meet my eyes. “Oh, right!” I thought. “I should see if I can even tell what they did.” I asked if there was a mirror and Christine pulled out her iPhone and snapped a picture  which she reluctantly showed to me.

“I am going to be in … so … much … trouble!”

That was all I could say. It was the first and only thought that popped into my head. My parents were going to kill me. How was I going to be able to explain this. I mean, I looked like I had just had surgery!

“How long was I in there for?” I confusedly asked Christine.

“About 45 minutes.”

Shit.

On top of the 2 inch incision on my neck I had now pretty much “gone under.” Even according to my own previous definitions I’d officially had surgery.

A week later, when we were finally able to sit down with my parents and tell them what was going on, my neck looked much better. But I still think that this was one of the pieces that of the story that made everything that much harder to bear. After all, it’s visual evidence and a reminder that this whole thing is real.

After the surgery, and although I was now filled with a little more doubt, I stood by my decision not to call and tell my parents yet. As hard as it was going to be on all of us and as much as they may not understand right away, I was doing it for them, and I was doing it because I still thought it was the right thing to do. They were 1200 miles away, there was nothing they could have done either from there, or if they had been here for that matter. I know how much they look forward to their vacation and if I would called to tell them over the phone they would have driven straight through for 2 days to come home just to see me. By waiting until they were home they would get to see me and touch me and just be there with whole family when I delivered to them the hardest news that I can ever imagine a kid having to deliver to their parents. For better or worse, I was determined wait and load up into the “happy wagon” when they got home.

Besides, I’d still have plenty of cancer left by the time they got home!

It’s now been almost two weeks since the surgery and everything looks much better than it does in the picture taken minutes after I came out. In fact I’m pretty stoked about what a bad-ass scar this is going leave!

Knife Fight Victim? or Cancer Patient?

You should see the other guy!

At least I hope it makes a good scar since I don’t really have any. Though the surgeon (cause you know, it was surgery after all) did a great job, and with the liquid stitches they use these days, it may not leave much of a scar at all. And if that’s the case, then I declare that having cancer sucks!

What I Say Now:

Updated 1 year later – October 1, 2011

Well, if nothing else, I did get a pretty good scar from the surgery.

Here is what it looks like today:

I can’t get over how much bigger I look in this “now” photo. I will talk about it later posts, but I was severely underweight at the time of my diagnosis. I normally walk around in the 150’s but at the time those pictures were taken I was weighing in 130’s (I’m 5′ 11″). Today I’m on my way back down to a normal weight and in the mid 160’s after topping out in the solid 170’s.

In the post I talked about our surgery consultation (which happened on our anniversary) I mentioned that we were shown the CT Scan. YOU can see the ACTUAL IMAGES (!) we saw up on the left side of the title banner at the top of the blog, the “Then” picture. She showed them to us, but I’ll admit that I didn’t really understand what she meant by “there shouldn’t be anything there” until I would see the later images from during and post chemo treatments. “Oh, so there REALLY shouldn’t be anything there,” I remember saying once we finally had something to compare it to.

My surgery was on a Monday morning, and that night my sister, Tanya, came over. We had only JUST told her what was going on a day or two before, so it was all happening really fast for her (hell, for us too). We had dinner and since I was on pain pills, and feeling like a rock star, we went out and got Blizzard’s from Dairy Queen. Because of the pain pills I don’t remember much else about that night, but I most certainly remember the Dairy Queen. Mostly because a few hours later I would learn the hard way that I have what is known as in “intolerance” to vicodin. In short, I spent the night throwing-up every 30-60 minutes. Lovely.

I was still nauseas, and exhausted from lack of sleep, when we woke up the next morning for our first appointment with my oncologist. I have this distinct memory of my head hanging into the toilet and hearing Christine on the phone with the oncology front desk to see about rescheduling. They didn’t have anything available for another week if we rescheduled, so I rallied and we went in. We were only T-Plus 8 days from my initial visit to the doctor, but we had lived a lifetime of worry and anxiety during that first week, so it felt like an eternity, and there was no way I was going to wait another week.

Really though, there weren’t too many answers she could give us once we were there, since it would still be several days before the results from biopsy were back. As such she was reluctant to give anything other than generalizations. In fact, it was at this first appointment with her that planted the seed that it might not be “non-Hodgkin’s.” She wasn’t convinced, and felt there was a good chance of the biopsy coming back and showing Hodgkin’s. As it turns out, she was right.

After a few days there wasn’t any more “pain” from the surgery. But it was sore for a little over a week if I remember correctly, and I was probably a week-and-half to two weeks before I would no longer think about it. All in all the surgery wasn’t so bad, and as far as procedures go, I would have worse. The upcoming Chest Port installation was probably worse.

Diagnosis Update

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What I Said Then:

Today marks 3 weeks since I first went to doctor at Christine’s urging with a cough. 3 weeks since I was told that that I have cancer.

I’m going to take a break here from the time-line of our riveting and unraveling blog saga to give some current news updates.

We finally received the pathology results back on Friday afternoon and it indicated that in fact I have Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (or Hodgkin’s Disease). We had initially been expecting a return of non-Hodgkin’s but in someways the actual diagnosis is better than the expected one. But in other ways it’s not.

For starters Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is one of the most curable forms of cancer. This is an important distinction to make, it’s not just treatable its one of the most curable forms of cancer. As in: one and done, if we get it now, and if stays away for a few years, it’s my understanding that there is something like a 90% chance that we’ll never, ever hear from it again!

Hodgkin’s most often strikes people in their late twenties or early thirties. Christine and I have already been introduced to 2 people our age who have already had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (past tense). As we already know its very treatable, but one reason that it’s so treatable is because it tends to be a very aggressive form of cancer and as such responds well to treatment. The downside to this, is that since it is more aggressive, it must treated more aggressively. Rather than a 3 week cycle of chemotherapy, I can now look forward to a 2 week cycle.

I haven’t had the chance to get into the details of the chemotherapy cycle (and to be completely honest I hardly know myself what to expect at this point) but I know that every 2 weeks I’ll be going in for a dose of chemotherapy which is essentially a cocktail of several drugs given intravenously to attack and destroy cancer cells. It kills a lot of other cells in the process The body then spends the next two weeks “recovering” and rebuilding (read: mostly throwing up) and we start all over again. Huzzah!

I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself at this point, in terms of the planned narrative that was originally being laid out in these blog posts, but this next bit of news is sort of a game changer so I’m going to skip ahead a few days and try to catch everyone up to speed in order for this to make sense. (What I’m skipping is our first meeting with Oncologist and a few other interesting (or not) tests. At some point I’ll go back and tell those stories for the completion-ists  out there who “gotta catch ’em all” and want the whole story)

So, on the Thursday following the Monday surgery I had what was is called a PET Scan. This is a test designed to visually show areas that are effected by cancer. This test takes advantage of the fact that cancer cells are highly metabolic (as does chemotherapy for that matter). Cancer cells can grow and divide up to 20 times faster than most other cells in the body. For the PET scan, I fasted for 12 hours and then had a radioactive glucose (sugar water) injected into me. The cancer cells absorb this glucose more rapidly than other cells and when the machine scans you it takes pictures of the radioactive areas of your body. In short, the areas of the body that are glowing brightly in the test results are cancerous.

The day after the test we received a call from the oncologist and the results of my PET scan (I haven’t actually had the chance to see them, but I hope I eventually will) were pretty much as expected. The tumor in my chest and the lymph nodes in my neck showed up the brightest. However, there was an area near my lower vertebrae that appeared in the test as dim glow. She indicated to us that this was unexpected, but that she wasn’t overly concerned about it as it didn’t look like the rest of the results. She felt that it was probably unrelated, but as it was important to get the full picture of what is going on in my body she ordered an MRI for me.

If anyone had MRI on their Cancer Test BINGO! Card, be sure to mark it off it now!   To recap in order: X-Ray, CAT Scan, Lymph Node Biopsy, Bone Marrow Biopsy, PET Scan, MUGA Scan, and now an MRI!

The MRI took place just this Wednesday and took about 45 minutes. I understand that a lot of people can get very claustrophobic during this test and it’s easy to see why. But for me, I just had a hard time lying perfectly still for 45 minutes and got pretty fidgety during the last 15 minutes or so.

We got the MRI results at the same time that we learned it was Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. It turns out that the area which showed up dimly on the PET scan is in fact cancer. This involvement of the thoracic vertebrae means we’ve received FREE UPGRADE to Stage IV cancer, with all right and privileges!

The biggest change is that we can now expect that I’ll be receiving chemotherapy for 6-8 months (rather than the initial 3-4 that we were expecting with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma) and additionally, like I said, I’ll now be doing chemo therapy treatments every 2 weeks. It’s faster, more intense, and longer. But it should have a better and more permanent outcome in the long run.

Finally, the last bit of news. I start chemo on Tuesday. But more on that tomorrow.

If you have any questions at all about this change of diagnosis, please feel free to contact me or ask them in comments below, and I’ll address them as I can.

What I Say Now:

Updated one year later – October 4, 2011

I remember EXACTLY where I was while I took that phone call from my doctor.

I was at home, and took the call sitting at the dining room table. Sitting on near the sliding glass door, with my back to the kitchen. The dog was outside, looking in at me.

I really didn’t react emotionally to the news because I was intensely focused on writing everything down and not missing anything (probably one of the reasons that I remember it so clearly. That, and it was a pretty momentous call). Normally I would rely on Christine in these moments, but she had only recently started going back to work, so I was on my own and I wanted to be sure that I didn’t miss any of the key new information that I was getting. And there was a lot of it.

New diagnosis. New treatment plan. A more aggressive staging. And some action items for me to do in order to make an appointment to have a chest port put in and to get chemo started.

After hanging up with her I called Christine. When she got home shortly thereafter we started making calls to the rest of the family. If I recall correctly, they all took copious notes on the new information as well.

This also marked a key moment in my Blogging. Up until that point I was speaking in the past tense about the events that happened in the previous weeks, but with the new information I switched into the present. Because of that, there were several things that I never wound up talking about, that I still need to go back and tell at some point: MUGA Scan, the Bone-Marrow Biopsy process, MRI, etc.

SO, it was a good deal of new information for everyone to wrap their heads around. But in the end it all wound up to be pretty good news. Yes, it was a more aggressive form of cancer. Yes, it had progressed farther than we thought. And yes, it would be a longer and more frequent form of chemo. BUT (and this was and still is a big “BUT”) I now had a shot at getting into that club of over 88% of the people who are diagnosed with Hodgkin’s and beat it.

So far, so good! As of this writing I had 2 of my “every 3 month” follow-up CT Scans. I’m on my way!

Change of Plans … We’ve got a bleeder!!

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What I Said Then:

Just when we think we know what to expect, and even when we expect the unexpected, the unexpected happens and changes our expectations. I award 2 Blog-Points* to anyone who made it through that sentence in one take without slowing down or furrowing their brow.

Today was supposed to be a big day, I was supposed to have an IV Port installed in my chest (it’s pretty much what it sounds like) and then have my first chemotherapy treatment. Neither of those thing are happening today, though we are still meeting with the oncologist.

I had a blood draw on Friday in anticipation of my IV Port installation procedure. Part of the purpose of the test was to ensure that my blood clots normally. Turns out it doesn’t.

The PTT Test (or Partial Thromboplastin Time) indicates the time that it takes your blood to clot. A normal result is 25-35 seconds. My result was 54 seconds.

The doctor asked me if I had a history of bleeding, or if I had ever noticed that my blood took a long time to clot. I didn’t have much to offer since I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid cutting myself. It’s just a general policy that I’ve had, and it’s served me pretty well so far. Additionally, in past when I was bleeding, I can’t say that I ever took the time to grab a stopwatch. ‘Cause… you know… I’m bleeding.

So, instead of going forward with the procedure today and starting chemo I am having a number of additional blood draws to test for a “bunch of other stuff” (I think that’s the scientific term) to try and figure out why my blood isn’t clotting normally.

When I told my parents of the change in plans my mom let me know that her blood has always clotted slowly and that there is a history of hemophilia on her side of the side of the family. So maybe that’s just the way I’ve always been and I’ve never experienced a traumatic enough injury for it to have ever been noticed or documented? That’s what I’m hoping for.

We’ll find out what’s going on and we’ll update you whenever we have a new time line in place for starting treatment. Probably later this week, or early next week.

*(Blog points cannot be redeemed for cash. Must be 21 or older and must have valid photo ID. Cannot be combined with any other offer or promotion. Non-transferable. Offer void if sold. Points must be earned within 24 hours of initial Blog post. Points are not real.)

What I Say Now:

Updated 1 Year Later – October 5, 2011

I still don’t really know what to say about that failed blood clotting test. It was such a blip that I had actually forgotten about it until re-reading it here.

When we met with the doctor a few days later I told her what my mother had said. She was intrigued, but said that I would have known by now if I was a hemophiliac. And that was that.

We never really talked about it again with my doctor, and after two chemo treatments in my arms (one left, one right) we just moved forward and put the port in. I don’t even recall whether or not I did another clotting test.

One thing was for sure though. You can never know what to expect with cancer. It became a theme once I started chemo as well. Every treatment was different, in the way that I reacted, and in the way my body responded. We would try to prepare for things, but it was rarely ever the same experience twice.

Expect the Unexpected!!

Today is the day!

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Just as rapidly as things can derail, they can turn around and get right back on schedule.

Today I start chemotherapy.  We’ll be checking-in at 1:30 p.m., and after about an hour of paper work and prep, I’ll start to receive my first infusion of chemotherapy drugs.

I’ll be doing this first dose without the chest port, and will receive it through an IV in my arm. The oncologist indicated that this will be fine as the damage to these smaller veins is cumulative and that one dose isn’t going to cause any problems.

In the meantime we continue to wait for the results from the blood tests that were ordered after it became apparent that my blood doesn’t clot normally. Early indicators suggest that it may in fact turn out to be genetic and just the way that it is. They took my silly “non-clotty” blood and mixed it with some “healthy blood and plasma” and in one test it brought the results down to a normal level. But in another test it reduced the clotting time, but was still much higher than average.

I was having trouble understanding what the problem was. In my mind I thought it would be a good thing that my blood doesn’t clot to easily as it would prevent it from clotting around the  semi-permanent catheter that’s going to be inserted into my vein. But I guess I was missing the point. The problem is that they are hesitant to tap into one of the largest veins of the body when they know that my blood isn’t clotting normally. Because of the location of the vein it’s not something that they just can just apply pressure to in order to stop any bleeding that may occur. And apparently its a “big important vein” that you don’t want to be bleeding out of.  Or whatever.

We met with the oncologist yesterday, and I got to see my PET Scan and MRI results for the first time (Spoiler Alert: I have cancer). We’ve been most curious about this whole “involvement of the lower vertebrae” that she had told me about. I must have misheard her because now that I’ve seen it, I’d say that it’s more in the mid to upper spine than anything else, but I’m not a doctor. It’s pretty small and you can see in the MRI images that it’s really just starting to form on less than a third of the surface area on one of my vertebrae. And as was confirmed in the Bone Marrow Biopsy (a story that I still need to share at some point) it does not appear to have penetrated the bone in anyway.

The good news is that since it’s so small and just starting to get established, it should be one of the first areas to respond positively to the treatment that we are starting today. It feels to me like another sign that we caught this in time to make a huge impact on the course of treatment, and that things could have been much worse had I waited longer before going in to see someone.

Along those lines I asked for some clarification about the change in staging. This tiny little nothing of a baby upstart tumor took me from Stage II to Stage IV, which seems like a bit of a diagnosis over-reaction to me. To me it seems like it should be a Stage III.5 or maybe even a II-and-a-half. She told us that there is actually some debate about this in the medical community and that some people would look to call it a Stage II BE. I told here that I was one of those people then, because that sounds MUCH better to me. I get the impression that she’s in the other camp though. And apparently I’m not a doctor.

But yeah, chemo tomorrow.

(Note: For those of you paying real close attention: I’m switching to the present and future tenses here. This may or may not surprise you, but I do tend to write these the night before and not around 4am when they are posted so that our East Coast fans can get their weekday morning dose of “Happy”.)

I really feel that I’ve kept myself in a really good place for the last three weeks now but tomorrow has me completely terrified. There is just no other way to put it.

All of this talk about this being “life-changing event” and about “how hard it’s going to be” has been just that, talk. The last three weeks have just been a build-up to tomorrow. Tomorrow is when this journey really starts. Tomorrow is when I will get my real first taste of what my life is going to be for the next 6-8 months.  Tomorrow is when I will first be tested and I’ll find out if this positive outlook that I’ve had so far has all just been act. Tomorrow I become a cancer patient.

Sitting here on the night before, I’m already experiencing some nausea. It’s obviously not the chemo drugs yet, it’s just my nerves and my anxieties. The one constant in chemotherapy treatment is that EVERYONE reacts differently. I wish I could take comfort in that, but from where I’m sitting it just means that I can’t really prepare for it, or to know what to expect. I doubt it’s going to put “visions of sugar plums” in my head tonight, and I’m sure that I’m probably not going to sleep well tonight on this, the greatest of all Chemo Eve’s. (It’s a good thing I have this “humor” self-defense mechanism.  My subconscious must have thought I was getting to serious here, because that joke practically wrote itself before I even knew what was happening).

There is another side of me though. The side of me that is ready to start.

I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this in the blog at all, but when I first posted my list of symptoms which took me to the doctor in the first place, I mentioned how they had all since disappeared. Well, the honeymoon lasted about two weeks and ended just this Thursday. The plus side of starting treatment tomorrow is that I do feel sick. It some ways it’s a blessing, I don’t know how I’d be able to get up and start this journey tomorrow if I felt well. And fortunately these symptoms are expected to subside very, very quickly and that I may never see them again after the first few days after treatment starts. So for all of the downsides to chemo I should feel better before I feel worse.

Here goes nothing!

One less chemo treatment to go!

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(Note to readers: Sometimes I post on the blog, too. If you’re looking for more of my posts, they can be found under the category “Stine Thoughts” on the list to the right.)

I’m happy to report that Brian made it out of his first chemotherapy treatment yesterday afternoon, and so far, it’s not as bad as we thought it was going to be! We have been told that his side-effects will get worse over the next few hours and days as the medication he was given through his IV wear off, and the next few days should be interesting to watch. The entire treatment took about three hours, but the nurse told us it will go faster once he has a chest IV port, and we get used to the routine.

The day started with us heading out on a few errands near the Group Health in Seattle, and then we arrived at the hospital a little early. That gave us time to head to the pharmacy to pick up the medication he will need today, and then we had a light lunch.

As we got closer to the treatment check-in time, Brian got more and more nervous.

I think he was seriously considering making a run for it in this picture.

"Maybe if I just sit here quiet and still, no one will make me actually go through with this." - Brian

Once we arrived at the “Chemotherapy Infusion Clinic”, a fantastic nurse with a New Zealand accent checked Brian in, gave us a tour, and started the process. Because Brian does not yet have a chest port (due to his apparent hemophiliac tenancies), the nurse started an IV in his hand, and we were off to the races!

After 5 minutes, he still has his hair. Win!

Cancer Patient? Or... um... cancer patient?

After 5 minutes of chemo, he still had his hair! Bonus!

We heard from several people who have been through this before that it is important he stay hydrated during the chemo treatment to flush his system as quickly as possible after treatment. Brian took this information to heart.

This is a photo for the "Health Matters" employee newsletter!

All of that hydration did as nature intended, and he ended up using the restroom facilities several times during the three hours we were there. This was a little awkward, because he had to roll a large cart of IV’s and equipment along with him as he went to the bathroom.

The fluid in the IV's runs right through him.

The fluid in the IV's runs right through him.

To start, they gave him an IV of anti-anxiety drug, and anti-nausea medication. This got him into a relaxed state of mind, and after 45 minutes of chemo, he ate a snickers bar while watching Cash Cab on TV. After an hour he took a nap, and slept through most of the rest of the treatment.

He slept solidly on the way home, and woke up long enough to get into the house and onto the couch. He slept on the couch until his sister Tanya came over at about 8 (hi, Tanya!), and then went back to sleep until about 10. Then he had some popcorn, watched TV, and went to bed.

So far, so good. He has several medications he has to take at various times over the next few days, but so far it’s not as bad as we were thinking. Of course, things will change as his body is subjected to more treatments, and after he loses his hair, and after he has had his immune system challenged for a while. Only time will tell how he reacts over the next few days, but I’m hopeful, and Brian is in good spirits.

I’ll post again soon, but right now I have to go cut up little pieces of cheese to hide his pills in.