Day 1 Chemotherapy

I began walking into this large open room with hundreds of chairs in individual cubby holes with IV stands sitting next to them. I sat down and my nurse named Ivy came over to introduce herself and begin her speech on what drugs I am getting and how long they will be administered. Then she looked for veins for my IV and of course could not find any b/c it is so freaking cold here and I just came in from the chill. Finally she found a vein on the side of my arm and put the needle in and began two different nausa meds. One is Ondansetron and the other is Dexamethasone Sodium Phosphate. The Dex one makes you dizzy every once in a while and you can’t focus on anything. It freaked me out, but it passed after a minute or so. 30 minutes later the Cisplatin was administered and it takes two hours. I am a hypochondriac at heart so I was thinking the worse when this began in my arm because my nerves were so high, I was having chest pains and panic attacks, but actually this med was nice to me. It makes you pee because it will damage kidneys if you don’t pee a lot. I drank lots of water and juice on top of the fluids just to flush my system. I had kidney pain while I peed, but as the night went on, the pain subsided. The last one hour med they gave me was Etoposide. This med sucks. It drains you while you are sitting in the chair. I don’t know what happened, but I was sitting watching a movie on my laptop and I got sweaty and my heart began racing and I just felt like I was going to pass out. Ivy came and told me it was my nerves and she turned it off for a while until my heart rate fell. When she turned it back on, I was fine. I still think I don’t like it much.
Driving home, I felt like I was in a different world. I could think straight and I just felt out of it. My husband ended up getting lost and my concentrating on where to go for him actually helped me snap out of it. Once home, I cooked dinner fine and then it just hit me. I was so tired and was comatose on the couch. I went to brush my teeth and lay down and then I felt like I was going to be sick so I jumped back up and ran to the bathroom. I didn’t, but I began aching and my pelvic region just throbbed. I cried, not for any particular reason, but I felt this was day 1 and I can feel myself crumbling, I can’t imagine what the next 2 months are going to be like. I will keep a positive attitude the best I can and will deal with this and take it as a learning experience if I am cured after ward.