Week 1 Update

Well, I am 8 days out from the first chemo injection (picture from my injection) and many of you have asked how it went, so wanted to give an update. Overall, the answer is fine. It cycles through a variety of aches and pains, but mostly it felt like a combination of the flu and period pain combined. So, not ideal? But also something I can handle. And it mostly learned up by days 4/5.

I should have a better sense next time of when things like nausea are about to happen and jump on the meds faster. However, they do say that future rounds do compound so I should expect to be increasingly ill with each round.

My hair has been hanging in there! They said it should start to fall out in clumps around days 7-10, but so far it also seems to be stuck to my head. As someone who subscribed to AARP at 49 1/2, I have some temptation to shave it early to get to it before it gets to me. But instead, I’m been experimenting with hair wraps and trying to best to learn to tie one (never my expertise). I have bought a few pre-tied ones, but they look very “cancery”, so I’m still trying to learn to tie it myself.

And I know you are all very worried about my taste buds! I will say, it is isn’t great. Anything acidy (which is a lot of food!) makes my teeth feel gross. And definitely things kind of have more of that metallic taste. Salt still tastes really good, but Diet Coke less so. The Diet Coke part might actually be a good thing long term! So, no tastes are specifically on or off right now, it’s just more that nothing tastes quite right. When I have time, I would actually like to understand this more (I assume that maybe some taste buds grow faster than others, so are likely the first to go from chemo?).

Unfortunately, while this first round has gone relatively well for me, on a family level, we’ve had some tough news. My dad has had some stomach pain for awhile and an endoscopy was scheduled for this past Monday. The immediate results from that showed a large cancerous tumor. On Wednesday, he had a CT Scan which showed the cancer was in the liver as well. He hasn’t met with an oncologist yet, but we are generally smart enough to know that those results in an 83-year-old is very serious.

This was also a bit unexpected. You may recall in an earlier post that I had noted that we are “more of a heart attack and stroke family.” So we’ve gone from no cancer in my childhood family to 2 of us having a diagnosis in 2 months!

Recognizing that this is the healthiest I’m going to feel for several months, we are working as an extended family to get together in California. This means travelling under pandemic-level restrictions for me: N95 masks, etc. I’m not really looking forward to that, but we are all looking forward to family time together.

As always, thank you all for your love and support.