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!