Weather Update

The solution to the two Hurricane weekend turned out to be pretty simple. The anti nausea medicine that I am taking was originally prescribed for 3 times a day back in November. In January when I got a refill along with a few other new prescriptions the doctor changed it to twice a day. I really didn't think much about it at the time. My pain medication had changed and two other new drugs were added. I think I just assumed that it was a different dosage.

So over the weekend I was taking the anti nausea medicine every 12 hours. When I spoke to the oncology nurse on Monday (Note: The term speaking may be overstating my side of the conversation. Grunts may be more like it. :-)) we talked about the meds and she was considering something else when I mentioned that I was taking the anti nausea medicine once every 12 hours. She changed that to once every 8 hours. That was when I remembered that the initial prescription was for every 8 hours. A quick look at the paperwork in the prescriptions folder and sure enough in January it was changed to every 12 hours.

I switched to every 8 hours and that seems to have done the trick for the nausea. I took a look at the log for the weekend and sure enough the "events" were all 8 hours or more after taking the nausea medicine. When I was looking for some type of pattern I looked at just the recent changes in the medication like my even newer pain meds.

Now that the nausea is taken care of the biggest problem is mouth sores and the ever present mucus issues. Chemotherapy disrupts fast growing cells. Unfortunately it is not as precise as just targeting the cancer cells. While going after the cancer cells the drug also gets some good cells. In this case it also effects cells in my mouth an lips. The pain meds help some but not as much as I would like.

A Two Hurricane Weekend

There really are two time lines for the current chemo treatment. The first is the one for the Cisplatin that is delivered on day one and then the second is for the 5FU that is delivered over the next 4 days via the PICC line. For the Cisplatin this weekend was days 6 and 7. For the 5FU this weekend was really the start of days 1 and 2.

The PICC line came out without a hitch on Friday. They measure the line after they take it out to make sure none was left in. (I really don't want to think about what they would do to try to retrieve a part of the line if that happened. :-) ) So for now I am a little bit less a part of the Borg.


The weekend was a bit rough. One of the side effects of 5FU is mouth sores. For some reason it seems that all of the treatment plans I am on tend to impact the mouth. I wonder if they are trying to tell me something...

In addition to the mouth sores it appears that the anti nausea medicine isn't working as well with this set of chemo drugs. The weekend was pretty much spent trying to manage the mucus issue that seemed to kick into high gear this weekend, making sure I got enough nutrition and water despite throwing up every now and then and dealing with the mouth sores. This morning I am going to put a call into the medical oncologist to see what else we can do to help manage the nausea. For now I have started keeping track of the times when I do throw up to see if it correlates with certain drugs, feedings or anything else. So far nothing is jumping out at me as the culprit.

While the weekend was a bit rough I tend to view it as just another sign that the treatment is working. If my healthy "good" cells are impacted imagine what the remaining cancer cells must be going through. Fortunately there are only two more chemo treatments and then I am done. Hopefully the doctors will be able to come up with something that will contain the nausea a bit better.