Toward the top of the list of things that I will not miss when this is all over would be the Neupogen injections. For 5 days after chemo I have to have a subcutaneous injection of a drug that helps to boost my white blood cell count so it will be high enough for me to safely undergo my next chemo treatment.
Christine has been giving me these injections for 5 months now and I don’t think I’ve made a single one of them easy for her. I complain, I protest, I whine. She’s really pretty incredible to put up with me as I work to come up with new excuses every night as to why I don’t need my shot. And I do feel bad about the many, many times I’ve blamed her, or accused her of enjoying the process of stabbing me with a needle, just to possibly make her feel bad and let me get out of it. She’s resilient though and it’s never worked.
So, for 5 days after chemo we go through the motions. The drug comes in individual vials that have to be kept in the fridge so we take it out at least an hour before giving it me so it can warm up, cold injections are very painful. About an hour or so after its been sitting on the counter we start to bicker about whether or not its time for me take my shot. She is in the “pro-shot” camp, and I am firmly in the “anti-shot” party. She quickly grows tired of this game and will eventually wander upstairs to the bathroom to start preparing the shot.
She gets a syringe, opens it up and draws the contents of the now room temperature vile into the syringe. At this point, her tone changes and I know that I can no longer avoid the invitable. With my tail between legs I go up to the bathroom and accept my fate.
Throughout the week we work our way through a series of 4 injection sites. The back of each arm, and fatty area around my hips (or love-handles if you will). After a discussion about where the shot is going tonight she uses an alcohol swab to sterilize the area and then she pushes the syringe in. Before pushing in the plunger and injecting the medication she has to pull back on the plunger to check for blood return. By this she is just to double checking that she isn’t injecting it into a vein, as apparently that would be bad. Assuming all is well, she pushes it in.
Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it doesn’t. it’s about half and half. Even after several months we can’t really seem to figure out why sometimes the injection is painless and sometimes it really hurts when its going in. Not the needle, its pretty small, but the actually injection of the medication. At any rate, it happens, the needle comes out and I get a little bandaid put on the injection site. Then I’m done for another day.
As many of you already know, Christine is amazing. I don’t know how I would handle having to give her a shot everyday and she handles it like a champ. I’m not an easy person to deal with it comes to something like this, something that I don’t want to do, and I HAVE NOT made it easy for her. Its just one of the many reasons why I love her.
2 more shots for this round. Then 3 more rounds of chemo… so 17 more injections… though maybe I won’t have to do the shots after my last chemo appointment, so it may only be 12!
Either way, it’s too many. I’m certainly not going to miss the shots.