1st Post Chemo Report, Hospital Discharge

Going back to the last post, I had feelings of accomplishment and joy, knowing that the first session was finally behind us. I calculated that my body was hooked up to chemo for close to 50 hours while I was in the hospital, and that does not count all of the other fluids and pre-meds I got while I was in there preparing to start the first FolFox session.

I handled the chemo well in the sense that I did not immediately throw up or have any real signs of my body rejecting everything going in, but between the end of the cycle and my discharge late in the afternoon yesterday you could definitely see changes taking place physically to the eye, and then I could feel strange things happening with swelling and just overall management of all of the poison that just went inside my body. After getting about 20 bottles of various medications before the final discharge, it was a really long day.

I have been in the hospital, which was unplanned, since Monday. Here we were still there on Friday, and I am just itching to get out of a bed and move around. I mentioned I had to come back to the hospital today, Saturday, because they needed to do an injection that helps with keeping your white blood cell count high, or high enough to counterbalance the loss. My body is going through this deconditioning already, so it is quite amazing to see the rapid physical changes that have happened in the last three weeks, NOT in any positive way.

Going back to the discharge. I did decide to stay in my Chicago apartment so it would be easy for us to get in and out of the outpatient injection and labs today (Saturday). My daughter Gina stayed with me in the apartment, and she was taking care of me so amazingly well, especially with the medication management. When you are in the hospital and there is a crew of nurses with a very regimented scheduling system and alerting system, you take for granted how overwhelming medication administration is to someone who is not used to it in a studio apartment. Gina helped me with my peace of mind, and I was able to take a proper hot shower, which was priceless.

A quick note on food. There is a lot of debate about what you should and should not eat once you are an active cancer patient, and I will be working through that with many people in the coming weeks. My amazing sister-in-law, Alyssa hand delivered two chef prepared meals last night, they were delicious. Today my choice was obviously a cheeseburger from Small Cheval.

In the next post, I will talk more about my amazing doctor and what transpired last night after I got to my apartment.