Taxol

Well, we made it back and got a bed right away! Phew. It took several hours for them to get things going. They had to give me several different meds before they would administer the chemo. They gave me 2 separate doses of anti-nausea medicine, then they gave me some Benedryl which made me feel a little dizzy, I had blurred vision and it made my throat feel like it was swelling up and then some other pill to help calm your nerves. All of this actually made me a little more anxious as they were making me feel weird and we hadn’t even gotten to the hard core drugs yet! Plus, I had a horrible reaction to compazine (a commonly used anti-naseua med) about 8 years ago when I was in grad school at MI. Went to the hospital for strep and got an IV bag full of compazine - was mistake on their part. Ginger kept reminding me that drugs will work differently when they’re going straight into your blood stream - it’s almost immediate. Next drug was the Taxol and they say that usually within the first few drops, they can tell if you’re going to have a reaction…I don’t know if mine was within the first few drops but it took no time before my face/neck felt like it was getting fried by the sun! They stopped the Taxol and then just tried to slow the pace of how quickly it was entering my body and it worked. After about 2 hours or so (I was a bit groggy/sleepy during this time), they started the Carboplatin and lucky me - no side effects at all I was done by 1:25 pm and have been hanging out to see if anything is going to happen, but all is good. This is quite a relief! Right now we’re waiting to see if I can go home tonight. I will be armed with lots of anti-nausea drugs and am anticipating the fatigue to set in, but really couldn’t be more optimistic about how it went today.