Chemo once again

Thank goodness mom's port worked fine this morning when they hooked her up. The nurses had a devil of a time with it a couple of weeks ago when she was in for her bloodwork. It had gotten clogged for some reason - maybe a reaction from the surgery. The nurses said that the body does strange things when someone has invasive surgery.

Her lab count results from a couple of weeks ago (Oct. 8) weren't that great... her CA 125 was up to 37 and her potassium was low. Even though that isn't a big jump for the CA 125, it still went up, which means the cancer is reacting to the surgery and the trauma it causes the body. They are going to put her on a drip of nausea prevantative medicine and then give her another bag of different nausea preventative medicine and then do a bag of Benedryl before they do the Taxol bag (the long 6 hour drip). The will also slow the Carboplatin drip down to watch for any reactions today. Apparantly the more Carboplatin you get the more toxic it is for your body, however it kills the cancer... so you take the risk for the benefit.

The Cancer room is full today. There is a new woman here with Ovarian Cancer and this is her first time with chemo. You can see all of the questions and uneasiness in her face. She doesn't know what's going on or why her body is doing this or if the chemo will get rid of the cancer. There is so much unknown in the beginning. And mom and I have been told time and again that every chemo treatment is different and people react differently. The taxol and carboplatin may not do the job for her. Only time will tell.

The Neulasta drug rep sales guy paid the Cancer room a visit this morning with a full menu of cappacinos, hot chocolate and any kind of coffee mixture you can dream up. Mom even ordered a cinnamon-caramel-something. She'll drink a few sips and then I'll probably have to finish it off :)

Neulasta is the drug that mom will take tomorrow to get her bone marrow to produce more white blood cells (because the chemo drugs kill them off). It's such a vicious circle.