Six Letter Word [Kaylor]

November 2016 (Part 4)

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't anxious eating breakfast the morning of my second infusion. It took a lot of self discipline to make myself eat, knowing as I did just how awful I'd ended up feeling. And now this week, I was adding in radiation too. My doctors and the internet both had told me that compared to chemo, the radiation would be almost unnoticeable in terms of side effects and that the worst part of it was having to go to the hospital every day, but until I'd done it myself, I had no way to know that for sure. Karlie knew I was nervous, so all morning she made sure to give me little extra touches, letting her hand rest on my shoulder a little longer as she passed, kissing the top of my head whenever she was close, reaching over to squeeze my arm as she ate her own breakfast by my side. That day was scheduled to be a bit different from the previous week for a number of different reasons, but would be more like the infusion days for the rest of treatment. The first week had been a higher dose of my chemo drug cocktail, which was the one ray of hope that maybe I wouldn't be so violently ill this time around. It had also taken longer to infuse than would become my norm, and I hadn't needed the usual pre-chemo blood work since I'd had blood tests the week before and there was no reason to think the counts had changed. I also hadn't had radiation, and would start that this week, though it would only last the first two cycles of chemo, most likely. I still had to take my cocktail of pills, though with the introduction of the anti-nausea patch, I'd gone down one pill. They weren't so bad, the pills. Most of them were supposed to reduce the side effects from the chemo, it just always felt weird taking so many, when most of the time all I would take was like two Advil, or one antidepressant, or one sleeping pill when my anxiety was really bad. Not six pills at a time, multiple times a day.

We were all a little better prepared this time. I was apprehensive, hoping I wouldn't get as sick, but nervous that I would, or that it might be worse since sometimes the effects of the chemo can get worse as it starts to somewhat build up in your system. Driving over, this time I still had flavored drinks, but we didn't bother with snacks. If I got hungry, by some miracle, my team would find me food within the hospital. I'd discovered that fizzy drinks were more palatable than non-fizzy, so Karlie had stocked up on these organic fruit flavored sodas, in different flavors. I wouldn't let her buy the cherry ones, because I loved those, and I didn't want to start associating them with chemo and vomit, because I thought it was likely that some of the things I ate and drank during chemo would probably never cross my plate again once it was over. I'd brought an entirely extra outfit, just in case, although I hoped that maybe knowing how it had gone last time, I would be better able to anticipate what was going to happen and maybe not make such a mess.

I still went to the infusion floor first, where this time it was Andy's turn to access my port to draw blood for the labs. Before every infusion from now on, they would check my blood counts to make sure they weren't too low from the previous infusion, and to double check that I didn't have any reason why I shouldn't get it that day, like the start of an infection or anything. Then I went up to radiation for my first treatment. They'd told me that compared to chemo, the side effects from radiation would be negligible, especially at first. Over time, I might notice some minor skin burns where the beams were aimed, like sunburn, but that was likely to be about it. Compared to projectile vomiting and lava butt, I was all for it. Just like they said it would, getting into position and making sure that everything was lined up properly took quite a bit of time. They got the mold of my body lined up slightly off, so once I got on the table, none of the alignment tattoos fell in the right place compared to the lasers, so they had to get me back down and move it just fractions of a centimeter to get everything to line up correctly. Once it did, they strapped me in and left the room.

I'd seen the equipment on my tour the day they set up the alignment, but I hadn't ever actually been on this table with the equipment going. It was sort of crazy, how it worked. This huge arm could rotate all around me and aim from a bunch of different angle to try to hit the lymph nodes while passing the beam through the least amount of healthy tissue. It was an incredible feat of engineering that they'd pulled off, somehow using the computer to map each place that they needed to treat and then calculating to the millimeter how to direct it so that it would avoid important structures, like my heart, and kidneys, and reproductive organs, while also taking the shortest distance to get to the cancerous tissue. And it did it quickly. I lost count of how many times it paused, because each pause was only a few seconds long, just enough to shoot a single proton or two at the target, before moving on to the next spot. And as promised, I still felt exactly the same when it was over, though pretty happy to get to move and stretch after being held so still by all the straps and restraints.