Where I take the first quarter
The protocol provides for four sessions of intraveinous chemo . As I live fifty kilometers from Cochin, I am brought in on Thursday at noon and released on Friday at the same time. The injection of the products is scheduled for Thursday afternoon. This allows the caregivers to keep an eye on me if any problems arise following the injection.
When I get there, the social mood is tense and some staff can't make it to show up: the rooms aren't ready because there aren't enough people to clean the floors. So I wait in the “family room” with two other patients. We're served a meal to kill time, and that's when I have this conversation about how you find out you have the disease. After the floors have been cleaned, we can move into our rooms.
Compared to the double rooms in Achard or the emergency rooms, the comfort level is a step up: a single room, much newer, with a shower that drains quickly, preventing flooding, real adjustable heating, etc. I settle in, put my clothes in the closet, and, for my first time here, am treated to a parade of all the people involved in my care. As we couldn't find an appointment to have the implantable port fitted before this first round of chemo, a catheter is inserted into my right arm and connected to a jumble of tubes, shunts, and taps, which will be used to empty five bags hanging on a stand.
Pipedream
Basically, three of these bags contain something like saline solution. Their role is to clean. The other two contain the chemotherapy. We start with a clean that lasts less than ten minutes, then a first bag for fifteen to twenty minutes, another clean, then comes the big bag of chemotherapy, which will drain for an hour, followed by another clean. To put it simply, the bags are all connected to a maze of tubes with valves that allow you to open or close certain paths. The products all end up in the same tube and enter a machine that alerts you if there is an air bubble or a problem with the flow (due to a kink in the tube, for example). It then comes out through yet another tube connected to your catheter.
The process is pretty smooth: the machine alerts you when a bag is almost empty, then when it's empty. You call the nurse using the magic remote control so she can turn the taps, adjust the flow rate, enter some data into the machine, and then you start again with each bag of product. As I have a catheter in my arm, I can't move my right arm too much because the machine detects certain movements as a blocked tube and starts beeping unpleasantly, not to mention the fact that you have to call the nurse to check it out. The first time it happens, it's a bit scary: What's going on? Yes, wuzguinon uh? Nothing? Good, then...
After this first round of chemo, I go to the bathroom several times to “get rid of the liquid” and in the evening, my legs feel a bit heavy, but that's all. The next day, back home, I'll have annoying hiccups for an hour, during which time I'll check with Gaëlle to see if I can take some Antimotil for it and if it will work. The hammer blow comes the following Sunday: extreme fatigue, a day spent in slow motion, feeling useless except for hanging around the apartment. On Monday and Tuesday, I feel things slowly coming back to normal, and on Wednesday I feel completely fine.
