I was started on a chemotherapy regime called FLAG-IDA immediately. This for me was a daily, two-stage process. In the morning, I would receive a big syringe full of orangey/pink liquid which was slowly pushed in by hand by one of the nurses, followed by a big bag of milky yellow liquid, administered by a machine. In the afternoon, I was given another bag of yellow liquid by machine. I used to wonder where all this liquid went and why my body wouldn’t just fill up, but it never did. The nurses said that as soon as the chemo was in, they wanted it out. So, going to the loo often was a good thing. I updated my university who were very supportive and flexible regarding my situation. I had decided to carry on with the degree from hospital whilst having the treatment but after a few weeks of the treatment I had to put the degree on hold as the treatment was taking its toll.
It is common knowledge that chemotherapy treatment is not very nice and it made me sick too. I was sick every time. Some people are sick, and some others are not. I was the former for sure. At the beginning of each dose, I didn’t feel too bad but as I progressed through I felt more and more sick until eventually I couldn’t hold back anymore. Each bag of chemo by machine took around 2.5 hours to complete and was attached to the red line in my chest.
The doctors would administer anti-sickness drugs, through the blue line, after each dose to stop me from vomiting. I would eat breakfast but this would not have time to digest before I saw it again and likewise with dinner. I was eating at every opportunity but it wasn’t enough and it wasn’t too long before I was on food supplements, the high energy milkshakes. The taste buds are one of the first things to go when being given chemo. The cells in the mouth last around 48 hours. When these are killed off everything you eat tastes the same, like cardboard.
The chemotherapy was given to me twice a day for about 2 weeks and then I’d be given a rest for a week, and then the regime would start over again. I had to take plenty of pills too. At its peak, I was consuming just over 50 a day along with some liquid medicines. They were mostly to prevent infections. Some were anti-sickness, some anti-seizure and a lot of them were tablets to protect me from the other tablets I was taking. Chemotherapy (as I write this) cannot target just the bad cancer cells in the body, it kills everything. This led me to have a number of platelet and blood transfusions when my blood or platelet counts became low. I had around 10 of each throughout the duration of my treatment.
I also had the first of my bone marrow harvests whilst at this hospital which was the most painful part of the whole procedure for me. The doctor would drill a hole in my lower back and syringe the bone marrow out from my pelvis. Sounds awful, and it was pretty bad. The area at the base of the back would be anesthetised and the hole would be drilled by hand using a kind of corkscrew device. Once the hole was made a syringe would be placed in the hole and the bone marrow withdrawn. Once the bone marrow starts to be extracted your pelvis starts to ache. The faster the doctor draws the bone marrow out the stronger the ache. Even with the area anesthetised it was pretty uncomfortable. The first bone marrow harvest withdrawn was frozen and would be used to try and reverse the procedure if it was all to go terribly wrong. I would eventually have 3 smaller bone marrow harvests by the same process.
I had six weeks of this course of chemotherapy with an additional two weeks towards the end of my stay at the local hospital. My hair started to fall out around week 4 and I remember waking up and seeing some hair on my pillow. I could easily pull clumps of my hair out and when showering I would lose a lot of it. I called my cousin, who is a barber, and asked if he would come and shave my head for me. I also had to have a couple of injections of chemotherapy directly into my spinal fluid, this was a quick process and was just a case of leaning over a chair and being very still. All this treatment at my local hospital was just the prep work, preparation for being transferred to London for the bone marrow transplant itself.
