1 down 55 to go

Yesterday was the first Chemo treatment. Scott and I arrived at the hospital at 10 am as instructed and proceeded to get weighed in and the vitals checked. Then I produced a two page list of questions to go over with the resident and Dr. W (Dr. Wisinski Oncology). This was about the most humorous part of our day.

Scott's turn to blog: So Janet pulls out her list of questions ( on one hand good, on the other hand do we really need to know Dr. W's favorite baseball team - ok I made that up, but really, two pages of questions?). We were in rare form which most residents can't seem to figure out. Janet asked about medications for side effects. The Resident says they will provide different medications depending on the side effect. Scott asks if he can prescribe Rogaine. Janet laughs, resident looks puzzled but begins to crack a smile. In trying to keep this family friendly, I won't get into Janet's response to "could you be pregnant?". It did have both the resident and Dr. W. laughing, followed by me saying something about the possiblity of Janet seeing the Schwann's food guy so maybe we should do the quick pregnancy test - that got us all laughing out loud. Laughter is way fun, but obviously not something they are used to in this particular department.

We then got a good understanding for hurry up and wait. Everything has to be ordered (like they didn't know we were coming or something) and like the bakery it is first come first served. I think we were 274 and they were calling 12. They told us to go grab lunch - Janet suggest Sonic, imagine that. Anyway we had lunch and went back up to see they were calling 250 (ok I'm kidding but any waiting beyond the fact the the procedure itself takes 2 hours is rough). After about another 20 minutes in the waiting area they called Janet's name. For reference we got there at 10 am, it is now 1 pm and we haven't seen one procedure.

Janet's turn: We were escorted to a room about 7 feet by 8 feet. If they could have crammed any more stuff in this space it would have been a miracle. I was seated into a not so comfortable recliner that Scott, being in the furniture business promptly said was junk. He got the better seat - a fold up wooden chair! The room didn't have a door but a fancy curtain that reminded me of the Wizard of Oz scene "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" The first round of drugs (Adriamiocin) had to be manually injected into the IV tube over 20 minutes. There were two syringes of this drug thus 40-50 minutes for this drug. It was red - and yes it comes out of your body orange to red color. It is suppose to and is a good sign that my liver is filtering the medicine. This wasn't so bad. I had an unlimited supply of cherry popsicles to such on and ice cream if I wanted. They like to keep your mouth cold to help keep the mouth sores at bay. I had two cherry popsicles then as Aruna affectionally calls it, I got brain freeze. The second drug (Cytoxin) was just pumped into the IV tube by a machine. This one took about 30 minutes. After that was done, I still had to finish the Saline solution - another 30 minutes. After that, my port was flushed clean, the needle was removed, and a teenie tiny round bandage was applied. Now we are off to pharmacy.

Scott's turn: So before this gets to War and Pease like length, there were only a couple of interesting things here before we left. First, because Janet insists on hyphenating her last name which makes it like 75 letters so the label system melted down. All they could put on the perscription bottles was Janet. We decided to have them use Slaughter so they have something other than Janet - cute, but not real practical in a hospital pharmacy. The second thing was the shot to help with her white cell count. Here is my pitch for healthcare for everyone. You know how you get a little print out that says how much you saved by using your store coupon card or coupons? Well we got one of those for each of the prescriptions Janet had to get (5 total). Each came with a little print out telling us how much we saved. Well the copay on the shot (one shot, one time, one dose) was $40. Our savings was $3,180.45. What the hell does someone do if they have no or crappy insurance? Sorry, you get to have low white cell counts. Hope you don't get sick. Our current system, while good, needs some serious looking at.

We did a little shopping before we got home. Andrei had a sleepover so Janet cleaned the kids bathroom.

It is Saturday now and Janet feels fine. In fact you could almost say she feels normal which is a huge blessing. She missed Andrei's basketball game this morning. She should stay away more often. He scored a season high 22 points, blocked like 6 shots, stole a bunch of passes and was in general a monster on the court (and for those who know Andrei it was monster player, not monster hot head the refs and opposition can't stand being on the court with).

Till next time...