Baby's first chemo

In which I stick a maxi pad to my forehead and hope for the best.

The chair at the chemo infusion center felt strangely familiar. It was basically a premium economy airline seat. It came with a built-in power supply, decent legroom, and a very chipper person telling me all the things I absolutely MUST NOT DO. In my case, that chipper man was Bernie the oncology nurse.

I immediately drew Bernie’s ire by showing too much butt when he told me he needed to give me a shot in my butt.

“NOT THAT MUCH,” he cried as I turned around and dropped trou. What did I care? It was 8:30 in the morning, my bod was full of cancer, and I’d been lulled into a false sense of security from being surrounded by three different guys named Michael at the infusion center (Nurse Michael, Patient Michael and my Michael – Michael Michael). What was a little ass, given the circumstances?

It turns out a little ass was not to be tolerated, for Bernie was a stickler for doing things by the book, contrary to what I’d soon learn was his devil-may-care catchphrase, “easy peasy lemon squeezy.”

“My job is to keep you SAFE,” he said whenever I asked if we could tweak the procedure to make it last less than 12 hours.

The day passed relatively quickly, even though Bernie refused to give me so much as a Benadryl, let alone an Ativan (“NOT SAFE!”). Starting a few days before chemo, they start pumping you full of so many steroids that when the day comes, you feel like you could wrestle a gator.

Before chemo, I had to get blood drawn to prove I was not pregnant (to take my word for it was, per Bernie, “NOT SAFE”). During the blood draw, I was once again roasted for having tiny veins.

“Before you, I take blood from baby. Baby was easier. MUCH easier,” said the phlebotomist. Tough day for her!

Once it was confirmed that my oven was bunless as ever, it was time for the aforementioned shot in the butt.

The purpose of the shot, Lupron, is to snooze my ovaries so they don’t metabolize too much of the poison during chemo and go kaput. It cannot be overstated how much people fucking hate this drug. If you ever have to take it, do not google it! You will be greeted by a Greek chorus of people saying it burned down their house, spanked their mom, ruined their life. To which I say, bring it on! I already have cancer! What’s a few more side effects? In this way, having cancer has turned me into one of those people who order a restaurant’s novelty food item that is so spicy that they make you sign a waiver.

In a more literal sense, it has made me the opposite of those people, because I now have the delicate and spice-averse esophagus of a midwestern baby.

Alas, the Lupron is only the beginning of the list of things I have to do to make sure the chemo doesn’t poison the non-cancer parts of my body.  Chemo causes nerve damage (neuropathy) to the hands and feet, and there’s some evidence that putting your hands and feet in frozen booties can reduce the risk. No one is exactly sure if this works, plus it is painful. Naturally, I spent $180 on several sets of the ice booties. 

They have to be changed constantly so they stay cold enough. This means you are useless and need to be constantly tended to, like a big baby. Kaiser doesn’t offer freezers to keep your booties frozen, so we rolled up to the infusion center with an Igloo full of dry ice (shouts out to the competitive pricing at North Hollywood Ice Company!!)

I donned my ice mittens, Bernie inserted my IV (“easy peasy lemon squeezy,” he said – yeah, EAT ME, mean phlebotomist!) and we were off to the races. By off to the races, I mean we began titrating an IV bag of poisonous chemicals so, so, so slowly.

Despite my lack of usable hands, I was trying to eat popsicles for as much of the infusion as possible. I’d heard this helps prevent mouth sores and chemo-related disruption to your palate, so I had loaded the cooler with the four boxes of Johnny Pops I’d impulse bought at Lazy Acres the week prior. However, I miscalculated, and not just about how many popsicles I would be able to eat.

You see, the dry ice is cold. Far colder than the ice in a normal freezer. That made the popsicles extra cold, too. I got a popsicle stuck to the full shelf of my bottom lip like the kid in A Christmas Story sticking himself to the pole. The popsicle was REALLY on there.

It’s best to remain calm in a situation like that, which is not at all what I did.

I blubbered and howled and started throwing warm water vaguely in the direction of my face in order to try to detach the popsicle, all while wearing the ice mittens. Hopefully it provided a fun diversion for Patient Michael in the bed next door. That guy seemed like he was chilling. He brought a newspaper and an excellent energy. I sense he was a Taurus. I wish him well! He leaned into being bald, something I have chosen not to do, for I have neither the bone structure of a V for Vendetta Natalie Portman-type nor the cool IRA sympathies of a Sinead O’Connor-type.

(Eventually I detached the popsicle, creating a gaping mouth wound in the process.)

Popsicle: 1 Filipa: 0

In order to not be bald, in addition to the mittens, and the booties, and the popsicles, I have to wear cold caps.

Taxanes (the T in TCHP, my chemo regimen) causes persistent alopecia in a decent number of people (ie, your hair doesn’t come back after treatment, or it comes back very thin). The only way to avoid this is by cold-capping.

Cold capping is a process of –basically – velcroing a series of proprietary $400 ice packs to your head so that your follicles hibernate. Not as much of the chemo-filled blood supply feeds your follicles, and you lose less hair.  All options cost thousands of dollars and none are covered by most health insurance plans. Kaiser acts like they’re going above and beyond by helping me to live. For me to want to live with hair and sensation in my fingers and toes is uppity and not their problem.

Because it was my first chemo day, the cold capping company sent a hair therapist to show us what the fuck we were doing. This guy was the best. Joseph was an angel from heaven (actually, he was from Orange – worse traffic but you wouldn’t know it from his delightful manner).  He helped my mom stick a maxi pad to my head so I wouldn’t get frostbite on my forehead.

In order for the caps to stay cold enough to do their job, they need to be changed every 25 minutes, and they also need to stay on for another four hours after the chemo is finished.

So it was that Joseph came back to my apartment where my mom coerced him into eating some chocolate cake from Pizzana and watching Love Island USA with us as he tended to my weird frozen dome. He told us that he has a friend who was recently on a reality show called My Mom, Your Dad, but when we tried to find it, it had been purged from streaming (what other gems will be lost to history in this manner, I ask you?)

The days since then have been a mishmash of side effects. Mainly, it’s GI side effects ranging from feeling like I have a hangover to feeling like I am a person with intergenerational trauma stomach. I’m on a million meds to prevent side effects from the chemo, and then those medications each come with their own side effects that call for more medications, forming a kind of ouroboros of Cronenbergian body horror devouring itself in the butt.

The cycles governing my life are stretching and shifting and changing. The usual ones have been disrupted, to say the least. The Lupron has stopped my period and made my sleep weird. I wrote most of this post at 5 in the morning. I’m less interested in what the moon is doing than usual (I have bigger fish to fry right now). Last night I got a notification from my astrology app telling me to “root out what’s zapping my spirit” right now. I have a few ideas!

My next infusion is in 14 days.

For years I’ve had this recurring stress dream where I stand on a beach and watch a tsunami forming. It’s too late to get away; I am frozen. I watch the water rise and rise before me, and I wait. This feels a little like that. But with weirder poops.