Round 2

Insomnia.
Migraine.
Nausea.
Numb arms.

Okay, so that's only four symptoms. But I feel worse than a dirty rat's ass. This go around with the chemo sucks.

The day before my chemo, I had a check-up with an oncologist (turns out that mine is going on sabbatical for six months, which is basically the whole time I'll be on chemo), my trial nurse, and a fellow. This particular oncologist happens to be head of the trial I'm on. Overall, everyone was fine, but I got the impression--and maybe I'm being overly critical and paranoid--that because I'm on a trial, folks are more interested in what happens to me more than they are interested in me getting better. I talked about my side effects and supplements I was taking, and they jotted down notes. I even told them about the splitting headaches I've been getting on a daily basis, but they didn't really prescribe any medication. So I have to wait until Tuesday to see my family physician to try to squeeze some migraine rx out of her.

Yesterday, the chemo session went fine. I caught up on Harry Potter and reading my Craft magazine. I also noticed how everyone in the chemo room with me were all Asian women, one of whom had a hard time communicating with the nurse because of the lack of English. I've seen this a lot lately at the cancer agency, which makes me wonder why they don't hire more translators or people who speak Cantonese, Mandarin, or Vietnamese (the three most spoken languages other than English, from what I can tell). Anyway, all went well.

Afterwards, Henry and I went out to eat before the chemo started to set in and I got all pukey. We went to a Japanese restaurant called Asahi-Ya on Robson, which was expensive but good.

Then I got home--didn't feel so good. I exhausted my allowance of puke pills, having taken all three prescriptions, took a sleeping pill, and put a heating pad on my head. Nothing helped. Every little move I made in bed was terrible--it was like when you've been drinking all night and then you lie down and realize that you drank too much and that you were going to vomit. Except that feeling was topped off by the feeling of having the most awful hangover headache ever. And then the numbness in my arms started. I had this the last time and told my cancer team about it two days ago, and they agreed that that was very odd. It's a numbness from my wrists to my elbows in both arms.

So then Henry went off to a meeting that he was late to, after he put the kids to bed, because he has a big event planned for Friday. I really needed to chat to someone to take my mind off the pain but it was kind of late, so I called my pal Russell, who gladly talked to me for an hour. Soon after chatting, Henry came home.

Now it's 5:30 am, I'll up, I still have a migraine, numb arms, and nausea. My tumour is burning. Yeah, I feel like crap. I don't want to go back to bed, where I'll just roll around in torture. But I really would like to sleep and get relief from the pain. This fucking sucks big-time.