#15 The Chemotherapy Process – Nov 13, 2007
Number of steps to the chemotherapy process: 13
Number of hours it takes to complete them: 6+
I’m halfway through my treatment now and have written lots about how I feel after I’ve had chemo, but not yet actually got around to writing about how it is administered. Well, now I’m going to remedy that…
The day of chemo always starts early, just because the treatment takes such a long time, so I have to be at hospital by 9am which means leaving the house about 8am to get there. Once I’m at the Cancer Centre, where the chemo suite is located, then I get seated in a comfy chair and get one of my arms, whichever seems most likely to produce a viable vein, wrapped in an electric heat pad for about 1/2 hour. As I mentioned in my last entry, this is done to dilate your veins and to help make them easier to find and cannulate. The actual process of cannulation can take anything from a few minutes, to 1/2 hour if they struggle to find a vein, as they did with me last time around. So by this stage it’s usually between about 9:30-10am, and the process of being given the drugs hasn’t even started.
Once the cannula is in you are hooked up to a pump, which the tube in your arm is fed through before being hooked up to the drugs at the other end. This is done so that the pump can control the flow of the drugs, and also so that the nurses can go away and leave you, because when the bag of the drug runs out the pump beeps and the nurses are alerted to the fact they need to change it. Then, before any drugs are run through, and also after each drug had finished, a bag of saline is flushed through the vein to keep it open, and to ensure none of the drugs remain clinging to the vein wall. After this initial saline flush, you receive your pre-meds. In my case these are two anti-sickness drugs, and two antihistamine drugs which are given to combat any allergic reation to the taxol. Once these have gone through it is finally time to be given the chemo drugs. First is taxol, which has to be given slowly and takes 3 hours to run through, then it’s the carboplatin, which in contrast has to be run through quickly and so only takes around an hour.
So, the whole process of the chemo being administered, once the cannula is in, goes like this:
Saline
Dexamethasone (a steroid anti-sickness)
Saline
Piriton (antihistamine)
Saline
Tagamet (an antihistamine that controls acid reflux)
Saline
Ondansetron (anti-sickness)
Saline
Taxol
Saline
Carboplatin
Saline
Pre-meds: total time taken = 1 & 1/2 hours
Taxol: total time taken = 3 & 1/2 hours
Carboplatin: total time taken = 1+ hours
Once all that is done it is around 4pm, and I finally get back home around 5pm, 9 hours after setting out. As you can imagine, even though I spend the whole day sitting in a chair, it is a really tiring process. The drugs themselves start to affect you quite quickly too and make you quite drowsy, particularly the piriton which often sends me to sleep for about 1/2 hour after I’ve had it. Still, the good thing is that I only have to go through it all another 3 times. I can certainly say I’m not going to miss it once it’s over!
xxx
