Infusion 3

It's Day 8 and I'm feeling great! Well, better. I'm officially out of the chemo tunnel but a bit beaten and nauseous. Always nauseous. Tolkien said it best: "I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread."

This time around, I asked for different anti-nausea meds during my infusion. I received the same bag of Emend, three steroid tablets instead of the standard two, but the Zofran was replaced by something else. I didn't like the way Zofran made me feel, the constant headache and buzzy vibrations from deep within my gut. I was truly stuck inside Sylvia Plath's bell jar, looking at the world through curved glass, a hollow sound in my ears, disconnected from people. On Zofran, I would feel that way for four days.

And boy! Zofran's replacement definitely lifted that bell jar. The world glittered with clarity and edges were hard. Perhaps a bit too hard. For 36 hours I felt like total crap, couldn't stand up straight, and would zig zag to the toilet in the middle of the night (which means peeing four to six times). Wow. But my head was so much better. Even Jason noticed a difference. I'll do it again.

But it's Day 8!

This time around was also special because my playgroup mom and I were sitting in the chair on the same day (she at a different hospital, but nonetheless we were descending into the tunnel together). And this was her final chemo infusion--hooray! Since she has a different breast cancer from me, she will receive radiation, ongoing infusions of Herceptin (NOT chemo!) until March to treat the HER2-positive cancer and 10 years of Tamoxifen pills to suppress the estrogen-positive cancer. She will be forced into menopause.

I, however, got to dance upside-down with the robot. And since my breast cancer is Triple Negative, I get chemo, chemo and more chemo. Motherfucker. Lucky me. This is going to age me in so many ways.

But it's Day 8! And that's something to celebrate!