Treatment 7 of 12

I had to start off by sharing my required “Treatment Day photo.” I look so weird to myself. My face looks so different, my eyes are swollen, my hair looks terrible, etc. I just look so foreign to myself, because I look old and I look tired. I’m not fishing for compliments – just observing the impact treatment has had. My hair wouldn’t look so terrible if I could actually do something with it!

The day started off well and I was back to my corner office! I had a new nurse named Jenny and she was super nice. She has two young children and a lot of chickens! She recommended that we get chickens, too, but my understanding is that Sean is firmly against chickens. We will have to work on him when we no longer live in the city, or at least not in a row home. We would have to put our chickens on the roof.

My labs were done pretty quickly so they ordered my meds and we started my Herceptin infusion at about 10:20 AM. I was super happy to see that almost all of my blood numbers went back up this week. I met with my oncologist and he said my numbers weren’t really all that low before, so I didn’t need to be worried. But it was reassuring to see that they didn’t get lower and I was happy to see they actually went back up! I told him that Sean had put me on the “Fried Egg Burger” diet and he said he wasn’t familiar with that one. I told him it’s to help boost my B12 and Folate! He said he’d have to try it out.

It is during my second and third pre-med infusions that I have to put on my scalp cooling cap for my pre-infusion head cooling. I’ve started noticing that it makes me really, really cold. That probably seems like a “no shit,” but it makes my body shiver and shake in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before. It’s really weird. I can’t keep my hands steady to reach out and do things and feel cold to my core. My hair still continues to shed, but I’m not even sure what percentage of my hair I’ve lost. Maybe 10%? It’s really hard to tell. If I’m honest, it’s not really noticeable to me, so I doubt it is to anyone else.

I’m happy to say that my treatment was pretty unremarkable. I just went through all of my infusions with no problems which is huge success in and of itself. I was pretty tired when I went home, but I think I had more energy this time because I didn’t feel quite so out of it when we left. Maybe that’s the effect of my blood numbers being better!

I’m writing this the day after my treatment, because I just don’t have the energy at night to write a post. All I want to do is lay down. I talked to my oncologist about taking a Benadryl before I go to sleep on the night of treatment to counteract the Dexamethasone insomnia. He was cool with it, but just warned me not to take it all the time. While I can’t develop a chemical dependency, I could build up a psychological one. I can’t say the oral Benadryl gives me anything even remotely as intense a drowsy feeling as the infusion, but it must have helped a bit to let me fall off to sleep because I didn’t stay up until 3 am this time.

I rested so well that I was even able to wake up and jump on my bike for an hour-long ride! I’ve shared a picture of my 6-month Fitness score on Strava. This is a reflection of my training and recovery added up over time. You can see my peak of 70 in February and March before all of this happened and then my big drop off while I went through biopsies and appointments in April and then surgeries in June. Actually, probably a big contributing factor to my peak of 70 was doing the Tour of Watopia on Zwift where I did a bunch of structured workouts and races. Then I just did whatever and nothing structured, so my numbers dropped off. But not being able to ride at all in the end of May and all of June really took its toll. I bottomed out at 20 and I’m slowly trying to build it back up.

I’ve been pretty good at keeping up with my weight training, but fell off a bit this week. With the COVID-scare over the weekend, I didn’t get in a session then and I didn’t do one before my treatment this week. Just need to pick it up again. I’m happy to have only 5 treatments left!