Vacation in Naziland

I told you I would report back on the weekend. Never said which weekend though. :) I´ve been more Zombie than Unicorn in the past two weeks but don´t call the butcher just yet! I´m back among the living (well, almost) and want to catch up with my blog before it´s back to hospital tomorrow (more on that later). It´s quite a lot to catch up on, so I´ll start where I left you- going to hospital.






New neighbors on Nazi station
It was back to Nazi station which kinda felt like coming home. Well, if your home was filled with unmotivated Nazi nurses, painted in urine yellow and you had to share it with a very grumpy stranger. I´m no ray of sunshine either but oh my did that woman have a temper! I´ve heard curses that make me blush just thinking about them! And she let her TV blare 24/7 which was also very annoying. Oh and she was also the reason why we had to be in half-isolation (she had a resistent germ), meaning we weren´t allowed to leave our room and all people coming in had to put on the complete safety equipment. Somehow, everyone was taking heed to these ridiculous rules but her, she was still walking out like she wanted to for smoking. Such. A. Nice. Person.

Getting started
Bureaucracy went surprisingly smooth. Same questions as usual, blood here, urine there, and while you´re at it put some cotton swabs everywhere. Then we let the young, inexperienced nurse put the needle in my port. Cause she needs to practice. And I haven´t suffered enough apparently. She put it in tilted so it hurt and we had to re-do it the next day before the chemo started. But I´m glad I could help a Nazi nurse in training. Meh.




Hospital food
The food was exactly the same as the last time. And I mean exactly the same. That´s how you know for sure you´re seriously sick and spent too much time in hospital- you have ordered the one and same meal for the third time... And then the horror! They cancelled pudding for breakfast!

Isn´t it bad enough to have cancer, do they have to take away the one good thing in hospital?? Chocolate pudding for breakfast! You devils! Shame on you!

Let it drip!
I have no idea how many litres of liquid really went through my port in the time I was there but I was hooked up to always at least one bag of infusion from Tuesday afternoon to Friday night nostop. There were of course the chemo meds- 250 ml of highly concentrated Cortison every day, 500 ml of Cisplatin over the course of in total 30 hours (watching it drop was better than every meditation technique it was sooo sloooow) and two times 1000 ml Cytarabine for three hours. Because Cisplatin is highly toxic for the kidneys and I really like to keep my kidneys it was also scheduled in parallel to give me 4 litres of sodium chloride solution every day to rinse them (four days of hospital- do the math ;)). And now and then 500 ml sodium bicarbonate solution to help them pass the toxic chemicals better. And don´t forget the two bags of blood because my Hb dropped below seven again. All this liquid caused water retention so I additionally receceived some infusions against that. Fight water with water or something like that.

Side effects
Cisplatin is said to be causing severe nausea and vomiting- this med is probably the main reason why we all associate chemo with throwing up. I was warned of this side effect but interestingly I didn´t feel sick for one minute in hospital (besides hospital food induced nausea of course)- thank you antiemetics! My kidney values were monitored closely during therapy and all that rinsing did its job. However, due to the water retention I totally felt like a water-filled balloon close to exploding. Heavy legs, swollen fingers and still you have to pee every five minutes. But all in all, Cisplatin was just boring and a lot of peeing.

I also had the typical puffiness you get from taking Cortison.

The Cortison was so highly dosed that it sent my blood sugar values through the roof (yes, it was the Cortison and NOT the Chocolate Marshmallow S´mores Frappuccino from Starbucks my Mom smuggled in for me! ;)). So those values were also monitored every few hours and oh my, I can seriously never be a diabetic! Stinging your fingertip huuuuurts! If the values were too high I got an Insulin shot.

And then came the Cytarabine- and I was gone. Like totally. It was running for thirty minutes and I fell asleep and kept on sleeping for the next like 5 days. Since this med is excreted not only through skin but also through the eyes the nurses had to wake me up every two hours to give me eyedrops so my eyes wouldn´t take permanent damage leaving me blind in the worst case. Originally, I wanted to write my "Blog on a Block" (cause that´s so retro!) during my hospital stay and just post it when I come home. Yeah well, did you know that the "H" in DHAP stands for "high-dosed"? So after Cytarabine I was knocked out and didn´t write jack. :)

Going home

I was counting the minutes together with Willie my SpaceStation until the last infusion was finally done on Saturday. My blood values were all ok enough and with the promise to drink the amount of the rest of my scheduled infusions I was allowed to go. It was such a good feeling to get the needle finally out of my port, it felt like it was going to break soon!

I packed my stuff, grabbed my discharging papers, waved my sunshine neighbor goodbye and with flying unicorn balloon I was out of there (instead of flowers which are not allowed on Nazi station. So great. Tysiąc pocałunków, Ilona!). But I was told that I took the chemo surprisingly good. Usually the blood values or the general state of the patient get so bad that the chemo has to be paused or even cut short. So yay me!?