Straight to the Heart

I'm sitting up in the hospital bed right now receiving my first infusion of Rituxan. It doesn't feel any different than the saline I was getting through my port leading up to it. We got here around 11am and by 11:30 I was hooked up via my chest port and they'd drawn blood. It turns out that they don't prep the chemo meds until you show up at the hospital, so we then waited until 3:30 for them to actually start administering the treatment. I was a little annoyed that we didn't know that in advance, but oh well. They started me at a rate of 20mL per hour and are increasing the rate every 30 minutes. If I start to have a reaction to the medication, they'll stop and/or slow the rate back down again. I'm hoping they'll be able to crank it all the way up so that I can get out of here faster. I have a private room and it's nice and quiet, but I still would rather be at home playing with our new kittens.

So the plan is to finish up with the Rituxan, and then I'll get shorter infusions of Cyclophosphamide, Hydroxydaunorubicin, and Oncovin (30-60 mins each). The final chemo drug of the series is Prednisone, which I will take as a pill for the next five days. I also will get a shot 48 hours after treatment to boost my neutrophil (white blood cell) count, which will help protect me from infections.

I woke up this morning at 3:45 or so and couldn't get back to sleep so I got up and took care of some little things that were nagging at me. Some work stuff, some getting caught up on personal emails, etc. They gave me some Benadryl so between that and the sleep deprivation I'm pretty tired right now. Still, it's a little hard to get quality sleep when the nurse comes in every half an hour. There's a TV in the room, but I'm so out of the habit of watching cable that the idea of turning it on to pass the time is not very appealing. I can order all the room service I want so we'll definitely be taking advantage of that. I've got books to read, music to listen to, and my laptop so plenty of entertainment if I need it.

My blood panel checked out- they look at kidney/liver function as well as red and white blood cell and platelet counts before each treatment. We also found out that my heart is in good shape- the results of the echocardiogram from last Thursday were forwarded here. The nurse here says that I should feel fine during the infusion today and that if I'm going to have side effects they'll kick in 7-10 days from now.