I can't sleep.....

With all the drugs they have given me over the last 24 hours I can't sleep.  I'll start with where I left off last post.  I am now pretty much all the way through now so I should be able to give you a fairly accurate account of what happened.

The first thing that they started was the fluids.  150mm per hour of saline for 24 hours.  That is 3.6 litres of fluid over the entire day plus all the water and other fluids I ingest.  After that the fun stuff starts.  The first drug they give you (and for me that started at 3.00pm) was a drug called Mesna.  Mesna is a drug they use to alleviate the symptoms of the chemotherapy drugs.  How it works I am not quite sure.  When I came in yesterday I didn't know it was on the cocktail menu so I haven't had time to research it yet.

After that they ran through a dose of zofran for a prophylactic anti nausea, they also ran through a shot of  dexamethazone for the same reason.  This was weird they said that it could make your arse feel like it was on fire.  I wouldn't say it felt like my arse was on fire, but I did feel rather intense pins and needles all over my anus.  Delightful hey.  Luckily, It only lasted a couple of minutes and then it was over.

Next, the main event.  The chemotherapy.  They give just a single dose of a drug called Cytoxan in order to kill off a few blood cells.  The resulting outcome is the body goes into stem cell overdrive in order to replace what has been lost, so in ten days when harvesting starts their are plenty of little stemmies to collect.  The cytoxan was run for about two hours.  But there was a problem.

I starter getting a side effect to the cytoxan called wasabi nose, because you get a burning sensation in your nose.  Seriously I felt like I had been sniffing chilli powder and I was twitching my nose like a rabbit on steroids.  In order to get past this the infusion rate of the cytoxan was reduced and gave me some benadryl which made me feel drowsy.

In order to make sure that I wasn't retaining all the water that they had given me they also gave me a drug called lasix which is designed to make you go to the toilet.  So if it wasn't enough to chuck 3.6 litres of fluid through my system I needed something to make me go even more.  Over the night I had three courses and on the first one I passed over a litre of urine in 45 minutes.  That level of urine output made my kidneys hurt more, so to combat this they gave me some Norco and Fiorcet, which were both analgesia to arrest the pain, and this seemed to work fine.

The other problem I had was that after I ate my evening meal of lasagne and mac and cheese I started to feel a little nauseas.  I decided to tell the nurse as I thought it best to nip this one in the bud, which I think was the right thing to do as they gave me more zofran and I felt fine.  Courtesy of the benadryl I then slept for four hours where I woke up at two and couldn't go back to sleep.  So I polished of the remaining of season two of Supernatural.  After breakfast I fell asleep again and woke up around 12.30, just in time for lunch.

So how do I feel.  Honestly, for those that are following me through the SCT process, there is nothing to fear from mobilisation (so far).  Apparently my WBC will hit rock bottom in about five days so I might not be over the fun part yet.  Also, hair falls out about the five day mark so I will keep you informed of any follicle displacement.  So right now, all is good.  I have lots of reading to do and I still need instruction on what to do with the prophylactic medications they want me to take at home and the neupogen shots.

I will keep you posted.  Until next time, stay well:)