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What did you do this week (and weekend)?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
Friday (yesterday) was the start of cycle 3 of chemo (I'm having 4 cycles), so I was in hospital having an infusion. Last time I was VERY POORLY in the hospital, and it's good that it happened in hospital because they all saw it and put it in the notes. I am on a lot of anti sickness meds (IV Dexamethasone, ondansetron, and metoclopramide) but for this cycle they added apripatent which seemed to be really good at controlling sickness.
The infusion is oxalipltin. It's adjuvant chemo for colon cancer. Oncology is really technical and it's hard to describe adjuvant chemo. As I understand it there's stuff that's treating tumours (may or my not be curative, sometimes used to get people ready for surgery), there's palliative which is not curative but is used to help control symptoms, and adjuvant where the cancer has been removed and you get a short course to kill off any remaining cells to help prevent reoccurrence. (and the evidence base is really complex because cancer is weird and stats are hard and chemo causes harm as well as killing cancer cells). Knowing whether to give someone 4 cycles or 6 cycles is really tricky because they're balancing the hems caused by chemo (which don't happen to everyone) against the benefits of chemo (which are hard to understand because the ways that mortality is counted is baffling)
I am very lucky - there's no good cancer, but some are more treatable than others. Colorectal cancer is kind of in the middle for my stage and location.
In other news, I put the Christmas tree up and decorated it. I've done almost all my Christmas shopping. Christmas is weird, I don't particularly celebrate it but I've started making more of an effort in recent years.
My sleep is all over the place and I aim to fix that by improving sleep hygiene, and if that doesn't work having 3 days of zopiclone.
This is sounds grim, but it honestly isn't so bad. It's a bit all encompassing - it's taking up a lot of my life, but I'm only having four cycles and then I'll be done.