“Hello. My name is David Thornton. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”*
That’s a photo of my dad from somewhere in the 1930s or ’40s (handsome fellow, isn’t he?) In the fall of 1986, I was just a young newly-married pup, and my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. He knew something was very wrong much earlier than his first visit to the doctor, but was really reluctant to have it checked out, so the cancer was pretty advanced by the time they started his treatment. He died in June of 1987.
That was kinda like the Iron Age in the science of cancer treatment; the drugs used were effective at killing the cancer, but the dosages tended to be high, and the collateral damage on good growing cells was really high as well. I’ve often wondered if it was the cancer that killed Dad or the cure, but since the cure wouldn’t have been administered without the cancer, the cancer is still the enemy.
Considering the advances in cancer treatment over the last 27 years, I’m confident that the odds of a win in my case are a lot better. The photo below is from 1984; he planted & cultivated 30-some acres of corn with horse-drawn implements, just like his dad did when he was a boy. He always wanted to do that (but realized quickly that there was a reason his dad bought a tractor for the farm when he was twelve!) I still miss Dad, a lot sometimes. You know how they say a man never really appreciates his father until he hits his mid-20’s? That was me. Cancer took Dad from us, from me, before I could really get to know him as a man. This fight is personal. Not just in a vengeful kind of way, but I don’t want to let that happen to my sons.
My cure got kicked off this week; got my PICC line installed on Tuesday, and had the first chemo infusion on Wednesday. Still feel ok, at least functional, afterward, but it was a heck of a day.
All in all, things went pretty smoothly today; the first of the four drugs in the R-CHOP treatment was Rituximab, and it took the most time because it’s the one that’s most likely to bring about nasty side effects during infusion. The nurse went over all the possible side effects of all the drugs beforehand, but there was one point where I suddenly felt a bit warm, so Yvonne stepped out of the room & asked the nurse for a damp washcloth; within 30 seconds there were three nurses and a nurse practitioner in the room. I guess I didn’t realize feeling a bit warm was one of the first warning signs of a reaction to the drug (she had said “hot flashes” earlier, and that didn’t register just then!) but by the time they started asking questions, I had also started to feel a little queasy (which I did remember) so their sense of urgency was spot on! They turned off the pump for about a half hour while the anti-nausea med they gave me went to work, and everything went pretty smoothly after that. Started at 8 am, finished at about 5:20. Heck of a day! I missed a follow-up appointment with the doctor that did my second jaw biopsy surgery, but I’m not having troubles with that (other than getting impatient with the stupid stitches in my mouth) so they didn’t feel we even needed to reschedule.
The evening after, could feel my pulse when I lay my head on the pillow, and sometimes my hands seemed to throb with my heartbeat; I’m guessing that has to do with the volume of fluid that was pumped into me throughout the treatment. That probably has something to do with the nagging headache I had that evening. Nothing major, but it was there, and probably understandable, and will likely go away as my organs absorb all that extra fluid. One of the drugs that went in yesterday was colored bright red; it’s a good thing that the nurse warned me that I would be peeing orange for a while after, because she was right, and it was a tad shocking at first. That and the headache were bearable though after feeling a great disturbance in my jaw, as if the voices of millions of tiny cancer cells suddenly cried out in terror and were silenced. I like to think we’re making some progress.
But… From what the nurse told us at the beginning of the day, the real symptoms probably won’t show up until the first part of next week; that’s when the toxins will start to kill off the cancer cells, and the collateral damage starts to make itself known. I’m tentatively planning to go to work today (Thursday) and doing as much as I am able, without overdoing it. It’s not like the work of a mouse herder is all that strenuous. The fifth drug in the R-CHOP regimen is Prednisone, which is a steroid. It’s in the mix because it helps the other drugs do their jobs more effectively, but has the side effect of making you feel like a million bucks. I don’t know if that’s the case yet, because it also makes you a bit hyper & jittery, so taking it at 5:30 in the afternoon wasn’t recommended. I get five days of that; I’ll post something on that stuff later.
The one thing I’m not terribly excited about is this PICC line; it was installed on Tuesday, and is the channel through which four of the meds are administered, but it’s a bit of a pain. It stays for the whole six weeks, and can’t get wet. It enters my arm on the inside of my bicep, just below where the armpit hair starts, so of course, the bandages protecting it caught all kinds of hair in it. And keeping it dry for showers requires tape to be wrapped around that same area; I ended up just trimming back that hair. Those were my complaints about the PICC line from Tuesday; today it’s less of a bother though. Getting the hair out of the way was big, but on Tuesday that was kind of the new irritation so all my focus was on the PICC line. Now it seems less of a bother, probably because I’m more used to it, but probably more that I’ve had the first round of chemo there are other things to focus on, and the PICC line is just background noise.
* For those who may not be familiar with that quote, it’s a paraphrase of a famous line from the movie, The Princess Bride, delivered by Mandy Patinkin playing the character Inigo Montoya. If you haven’t seen the movie, why the heck not? If not, no big deal, really; I may have watched it enough times myself to cover a small theater full. Watch the clips below to understand the paraphrase better, but best is to watch the movie! Or read the book. The movie is incredibly faithful to the book, so either way… It’s all good!