Day 1 of Recovery

Today we went for the first round of Chemo. Grammy has Jessica. The neighbour has the dog. We just have to worry about getting a bunch of chemicals into Carolin and getting home. The tension would be worse except for 2 hrs of "cancer school" on Monday where they told you more things to expect. Of course it was heavy on the side-effects portion. The cocktail of drugs each patient takes is done just for them. Carolin's is so potent that everything that comes out of her for two days afterwards is to be treated as toxic, and she's to drink a lot of water to flush it out asap. She's booked back at the cancer clinic in 20 days to have a blood test, see the doctor, and then get dose #2 the next day.

A big concern is nausea. They (apparently) have a lot of good drugs to help with that. She takes them twice a day for 3 days after each treatment. We'll see.

The "day care" ward is OK. There's about 20 chairs there for patients. Many things are done to make the patients comfortable and the nurses are nice. I got to go in for moral support but after all was said and done, there's not a lot I could do to make things go better. Total time getting IV's was 2 hrs.

First IV was anti-nausea stuff. Apparently it was cold and felt odd running around Carolin's arm in the veins. The second injection was the workhorse drug. It was manually pushed in using 3 large hyperdermics taking 10-15 minutes. The third was another bag of some chemical with a fourth being just saline to wash it all down. We got out into the daylight about lunch time and so far so good. She seems fine. I expect some reaction eventually. The afternoon soap always makes me sick......