Mardi Gras in My Veins

Chemotherapy No. 3 can be checked off the list. For each session, I’ve had the same oncology nurse assigned to me. Her name is April and she’s cheerful, knowledgeable, and good at what she does. I’m to the point that when I am in the waiting room waiting for my name to be called for treatment, I hope it will be April there to greet me.

April handed me a letter that the Doctor had left in my file. Tuesday I had asked him for a Doctor’s note to provide to my insurance provider. I will be applying for some intermittent short-term disability at work considering I’ve used nearly all of my sick and vacation time. I loved the way he worded a particular line of the letter that stated that I was being administered “very toxic chemotherapy.”

Robbie and I played two rounds of Scrabble and I won both. After the first game, April told Robbie she would be giving me the Ativan soon and that his chances of winning would be improving. The Ativan is an anti-anxiety/anti-nausea medication that makes you feel extremely relaxed and drowsy. Usually my mind has about 10 different lines of thought any given minute. Ativan silences all that head noise and actually does make me feel less anxious. It goes into the book as one of those little perks of having cancer. I do admit, probably does not help my scrabble game.

Today I took a photo of April administering the Adriamycin (Red Devil). It is the very red and very bad-ass cancer drug that causes most of the side effects people have including nausea and hair loss. I think a lot of chemo. regimens have this particular drug. She hand administers it into my IV line. If this particular drug gets on your skin it will literally destroy the tissue. Not sure how it survives in the veins in order to do its job, but apparently it does.

After chemotherapy, Robbie and I came home and I managed to stay awake for about an hour, but then headed to bed and took a wonderful two hour nap. I’m hoping the nap will allow me to stay awake until a normal hour this evening. I’m looking forward to watching American Idol. Although these new judges have me wondering how long I’m going to stick with this season.