Pepper toyed with the idea of eating and drinking again on Thursday. She flirted with it. Dipped her toe into the lake if you will. Still it’s a good sign that we moving in the right direction again.

Unfortunately the plan (and so it goes with cancer treatment) is to get her to a place where we think she’s healthy enough we can give her chemo again and smack her back down a few pegs.

They gave us the pills to give her once we get word from the Vet to do so. They are covered with warning labels to wear gloves while handling. In fact it says to wear 2 pairs of gloves… and this is what we will be feeding to our dog.

It’s quite reminiscent of my own chemo treatments. Only in my case the protocols for self-protection that the nurses going through were much more stringent. Also, they were injecting the drugs directly into my veins.

Dacarbazine (the D in ABVD) seemed to be the drug where they took the most caution. Unlike most of the other drugs they didn’t administer it in an IV drip. They pushed it in slowly and manually. It came in a big syringe and was the color of bright red death. They called it the Red Devil.

Before giving the dacarbazine the nurse would put an extra pair of gloves over the ones they wore standard, added eye protection, and then put on a full “arms in first” plastic gown. When the nurse who was a few months pregnant did it, she even went beyond that and had some kind of protective lead vest (like you get at the dentist during x-rays) over her abdomen. She was pretty much ready to diffuse a bomb.

Apparently if this leaks out of the syringe, or the vein, there is trouble and it will quickly and painfully scar and kill any tissues that it comes in contact with. So you know, they would inject a half-pint of this stuff into me every 2 weeks for 6 months.

But I digress.

Pepper SEEMS to be slowly coming out of whatever this latest episode was all about.

Before I go, I want to share this series of stock photos that I came across when I did a Google Image search for giving chemo injections when I was looking for a possible picture of the levels of protection the nurses used. I didn’t find a good one, but these images came up a few times and they were too good not to share. I like how several times the nurse becomes the patient!

Also I feel like this image also really sums up my experience: