In the beginning, I was traveling to my doctor's office 3 times a week, during treatment: actual treatment, the day after for a Neupogen shot, and Friday for lab work.
The shot was the WORST part of the whole ordeal. It was large, painful, caused occasional nausea and frequent bone pain, bruises on and around injection sites, kept me up at night, and stuck me right in the gut every time. I needed it, though, to help stimulate my body's infection-fighting powers, my little neutrophils-white blood cells which help me stay healthy (or healthy-ish) during strong chemotherapy.
In the beginning of my cancer fighting era, I hated this thing. I had to lie down to get the shot to my gut. I wanted to skip this devil, as it seemed that I was one of the patients who had it the worst with the minuscule step to the entire process .
My current doctor opened my eyes to a possible cause of why this immuno-booster might have been so dreadful for me in those days: back then, I was 33 years old and otherwise healthy. I had lots of white blood cells. Stimulating my bones to grow more was like forcing a full stomach to eat a whole pizza. It was going to hurt, but I would need the extra supply as treatment started to get down the road and my body began to weaken. The pain was all in trying to build a storage.
These days, Neulasta, an on-body injection system for this drug has made the process much easier. I experienced it on Chemo #4, and had it placed on my abdominal area on Tuesday. Easy-peasy.
Could it be?
Couldn't possibly be for me.
As I was dressing for my day in Corona Classroom lockdown, I heard a tiny clunk on my bathroom tile. And, what did my wandering eyes behold?
What was happening on top of everything else?
As I searched the floor in the area behind which I was standing,
the problem became clear.
That alien to my body
decided to jump-ship from my stomach and not give me the meds I needed to grow my bones.
There it was, still blinking its green light, ready to release in 5 or so hours, but no longer attached to its host.
We thought about attempting to put it back in, but once that baby's out--it's out.
Like what seems to be going on in the world around us, things are not what they should be.
I was promised this easy delivery of medication, keeping to the isolation protocols +
corona social distancing. Not so!
I was nervous about the olden-times. I didn't want that big, painful, ancient-of-days needle all the way from the past of 2013 to be part of my cancer-fighting present, but I caught the beast in my tiny hand and trudged back to the cancer clinic, expecting the past to creep back into my modern life.
When the nurse unloaded the injector out of the box, I realized something I had not before:
that big, beastly needle has changed in the last decade.
It was much less painful, even in needle form than the needles of my cancer-fighting beginning of days.
I'm back to kicking cancer to the curb with a new weapon.
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