A Picture of Chemotherapy

I prepared some images of my chemotherapy. I go in once every three weeks to get it. These pictures are from Round 2 (props to Heath for the pictures). Note that Heath had a keen eye for the important details, so watch out if you don't like blood. I just pretend it is Otter Pop juice or something, then it's all cool.

I started my day by wheeling into the Oncology clinic. I entered the side entrance in the garage because I know my way around now. You can see my buzz of hair in the picture. Some hair fell out into my hands that morning.

I wheeled myself inside and checked in. The first thing on the agenda was to get a blood draw to see if my blood counts would indicate that my body could handle the next round of chemotherapy. The first round I had to go to the laboratory for them to draw the blood first, but this time they just did the blood draw in the Oncology unit. IV's are amazing, they actually insert a needle into your vein, and then retract the needle, leaving behind a plyable catheter. I always thought that a rigid, metal needle remained in your arm. This is where my nurse, Lindsey, drew my blood (notice the arm hair...we'll get to that later).

They took the blood to someone that went through and counted my blood cells, plus they did a metabolic panel. I had to meet with the doctor about the results. That doctor set me up with the list of new drugs I would take to fight the side-effects of the chemo. I popped in an Emend at about 10:00, once I knew that I would be getting chemo. While waiting for the blood results, they were giving me IV fluids, which is just a saline solution that goes into your blood and hydrates you. It also helps to know if you have a leak in your IV, which I ended up having.

That pictures shows me showing off my IV leak. The Otter Pop juice is running out of the place where these couple of arm hairs got caught in this screw thingy. Blood leaking is not a problem at this point, because if there was a little bit of saline solution leaking out, then it is no big deal. But we had to fix the leak before my first two chemotherapy drugs were administered because they are vessicants, meaning that if they spilled out onto my skin or outside of my veins it would burn me to the point where I would need a skin graft. In order to work on the leak, Lindsey had to rip the tape off multiple times. The hair ripping out is the most painful part of cancer, though it is only momentary, and always comedic. Heath did a great job of capturing the piece of fur attached to the tape she ripped off my arm while it was sitting on my PAMF sheets.


As I sat staring at that ridiculous patch of fur sitting on my bedsheets, I decided I would buzz my arm hair when we shaved my head.

Lindsey, fixed the leak, gave me an anti-emitic, Kytril, and then pushed in the Adriamycin and Vinchristine. This is what the Adriamycin looked like the first round while they were squirting it in me.

They do 50 cc's of Adriamycin, then 2 cc's of Vinchristine. After those vessicants are done, they flush my veins with saline, then I wait as the Cytoxin drips in over an hour and a half or so. After the Cytoxin, they flush me again, then give me the Rituxin, which is a monoclonal antibody. Rituxin is amazing. To make it, they inject a healthy mouse with cancer (thanks, mouse!), then they extract the cells in the mouse that produce the antibodies that mark the cancerous cells. The cells they extract can continually produce the antibodies. Antibodies are proteins that stick to the outside of antigens (foreign, bad substances). So, the mouse juices squirted into me attach on my cancer clumps and identify them for destruction. Pretty sweet.

We probably got out of there at 6pm or so. It was an all-day fun time. I got hopped up on some drugs. You can see me here hanging out in Mountain View on Friday. My eyes aren't exactly right. I also apparently, had not changed clothes.

If you had an x-ray camera and you could see inside my right hip, you would find the mouse juice dousing my acetabulum. If you had a sensitive sound catcher, you would hear the cancer cells shrieking in agony as the mouse juice pointed them out and the CHOP chemo drugs strangled them by their cancerous necks. If you scrolled up a little though, you would find equal chaos brewing in my stomach. This picture is of a walking/crutching pharmacy - a sack of skin encapsulating a million drugs. I know we are more than the the summation of the fluids and clumps that our skin retains, but sometimes you just feel like a lab mouse.