It's been a while since my last post. Rest assured...everything is fine. In fact, almost too fine. I've been so caught up with being normal I put off posting. Going back to where I left off. It was getting close to Valentine's day and still no hair loss. I thought it was pretty bold for my Breast Care team to be able to tell me the actual day I would see my hair loss. I was convinced they were wrong because on the morning of February 13th, I still had no hair loss. Actually, I take that back, I didn't have to shave my legs. But I still had all my hair on my head and I even tried to pull and no luck in removing hair.
I went to work and by afternoon realized I was the one who was too confident. Why on earth did I actually even try to think I was "different" and my medical team predicted my hair loss wrong? I was in a meeting and casually ran my hand through my hair...OH MY GOODNESS! I was able to pull probably 15 or so hairs out. I didn't know what to do with myself. I was shocked. I let myself cry my two tears and then I couldn't wait to show my friends that it was happening.
By Friday (02/15), the hair loss was in full swing and it was chemo day. I was determined though to wait until the weekend to shave my head. Thank goodness I had thick hair so it really just looked thinned down. I'm happy to announce that chemo #2 was even more normal than the 1st time around. Adam and I showed up at 8:45. I brought a lighter load of things to keep me occupied this time. They brought me back, took my temperature and vitals and then it was time to go back to chemo. We had our choice of seats again and picked a nice secluded section in the back corner.
I was a little nervous, hoping that my port didn't act up this time around. I got my mask on and Kelly (my nurse) put her's on while she accessed my port. To my relief, the port worked perfectly! She got me all set up to where I was ready to receive chemo and then we were off to an exam room to meet with my oncologist for a check-up. Everything looked good and blood work came back good so I was cleared for chemo #2. Before I knew it, I was on my laptop trying to catch up on some email from work and Adam watched some tv.
We had our dear friend, Andre, visit again. He is so nice to take time out of his day and come sit with us during the treatment and keep us entertained. One of these days we will convince him to come to lunch with us. It's always nice to have company to keep us distracted from the reality of why we are there.
After chemo, Adam and I went to lunch at Chili's. BAD IDEA! If there is one piece of advice I can give about how I handle chemo it's that unhealthy food and chemo do not mix. While it tasted okay at the time, I paid for it later that night with the nausea. I didn't throw up but I was not having a good time. All in all, the rest of the weekend was mild. Even the muscle pain from the Neulasta wasn't even comparable to what it was the first time around. The nausea overall was worse but I wonder if that's in part my fault.
On Saturday morning, I knew it was time to shave my head. I was tired of being covered in hair. I called my neighbor Julie and she came over to help take pictures and videotape the event. Adam got his cutters and we went to town buzzing my head. I didn't want to shave it all the way down knowing I was immunosuppresed and didn't want to possibly cut myself and risking infection so we held off on that. But obviously we had to have some fun so first we did a mo hawk and then colored it pink and blue. Then it was time to go bald. All in all, it was somewhat liberating to shave my head. The way I look at it is I still got to have some control on when I went bald. Also, a good friend of mine who went through the head shave experience told me to look at it as a sign of the chemo doing exactly what it was supposed to. Since then, I've shaved it down to where my skin is baby soft. It's a weird in the fact that it's my head yet nice kinda soft. Now all I need is a white t-shirt, some rubber cleaning gloves and a spray bottle and I'll be Mr. Clean's sister. :)
If there's anything I have learned, it is to always look for the positive. Yeah the nausea was worse this time, so much so that I'm now taking another medication for acid reflux, but in the grand scheme of things, I'm just thankful it's not worse where I'm visiting the porcelain god every 5 minutes or contracting some type of infection.
Alright folks, that's 2 AC chemo treatments down....2 more to go. Next one is Friday!
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