Back to Work

I remember driving by the hospital a few times after I got out in April 2010 and it gave me chills to look up at this oncology building that I had spent so many months at and almost didn't make it out of. Every time I drove by, I would say to myself "thank god all that is behind me" and didn't ever proceed to consider the possibility of ending up here again, because it was that scary. I thought I had paid my dues. Those moments feel like a distant memory now that I'm back here again for quite some time...


I"m doing another round of chemo at Inova Fairfax (same thing I did here last month) before going in for the Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT). I'll be here for about 3-4 weeks, then get about 2 weeks off and sometime around the end of december, we'll start at Hopkins. I'll post on here as much as I can while I'm here and when the transplant starts to provide updates so that I don't have to repeat the same story over and over again. 


A typical chemo cycle starts with about two weeks of IV infusions during the day and night. One of the drugs that I'm on right now is infused for 7 days continuously, 24/7. The other 3 are all about 3-4 hour infusions, given twice a day until the end of the second week. This means that after the end of week two, I'm done receiving all the chemo and waiting for my body to process everything and hit the low (the point at which chemo has killed almost all of my blood cells) so that I can bounce back up to normal blood counts over weeks 3 and 4. This is just a general timeline; it often takes a little bit more or little bit less time for this cycle to complete. In addition to the chemo fluids, I'm on normal saline and sodium bicarbonate, which helps protect my kidneys against damage from the toxicity of the chemo. Basically, I have to pee at least every hour, if not more often. 


At some point during week 2, they start giving me neupogen shots that basically force my bone marrow to start producing cells again (hopefully all normal and no blasts) at an unnaturally high speed. Normally this process takes months, but they make my bones jump into overdrive mode and produce in just a couple weeks the amount of work it would normally take months to produce. I pay my bones for this overtime work by withstanding the pain that they cause during this process. There are also long term consequences of overworking your bones like that: it makes them weaker. Especially if you repeat these chemo cycles over and over again as I have and for two rounds of leukemia treatment. During the break time, (the time before relapse and after the first treatment in 09-10) I think I did a good amount of work in trying to make my bones strong again and reversing the damage, but I feel like no matter how hard I work, the same degree of strength is impossible to achieve. I'll get closer and closer over time, depending on how hard I work at it, but I remember how my body used to feel before all this very clearly - it was amazing, incomparable to the condition I'm in now. Once the foundation is weakened (like it was during the time of critical illness last year,) a builder can only do so much when constructing the rest of the house. 


Anyway, as soon as my blood counts come back up, they let me go home. This time I'll have about two weeks off before I go to Hopkins to do the transplant. Can't. Wait. 


SIKE. 

New high-tech IV machines...also heavier and a pain in the ass when trying to walk around. They're def up there on my list of things that I never want to see again when I'm done.