Chemo Day #1

Today is the first day of Chemo. We go and talk about it for awhile and the oncologist finally recommends we take Adriamycin over Docetaxel, with Cytoxan added. We'll "only" have 4 cycles, and we're doing the "dose-dense" treatment every two weeks, so we feel sort of lucky that ours will over in 2 months.

They give me a steroid, Benadryl, and something called Aloxi for nausea. Then they push in two big vials of the Adriamycin (a.k.a. doxorubicin). Finally they hang a bag of the Cytoxan and let it drip in. The whole treatment takes about 2 hours.

We go home and I feel fine for about 4 hours and then start to feel nausea. I take the Compazine they gave us and then the Zofran. No vomiting. I finally get some sleep at about 11 pm.

To Mayo We Go

We get a flurry of appointments at Mayo. We meet with an oncologist who says we might consider 4 cycles of Docetaxel instead of 4 of Adriamycin and 4 of Taxol. Shorter sure sounds better to us, and maybe Docetaxel is a better drug with less side effects.

Next we meet with a radiation oncologist who says we don't have much use for radiation. Followed by another radiation oncologist who can't seem to decide if we need radiation or not. We ask if there are any gray areas where we might receive some radiation but not the whole 36 treatments but no. The radiation oncologist who can't decide (we call her the hand-wringer) defers judgment to the whole team.

Finally we meet a surgeon. She wants to re-excise the area and try to get better margins. We decide we'll do it if we can avoid radiation. It also means another month before the chemo can start though and it's awful knowing that is coming. Two days later we schedule the surgery.