This sounds familiar

Once again I’ve been sent home after having my blood examined. I continue to not be studying hard enough for my blood tests. My platelets are doing very well with the every three week regimen, but my white blood cells just can’t keep up. This is likely due to the effects of radiation: all that pelvic bone marrow is no longer as robust as it used to be. My numbers are fine when I’m not taxing my bone marrow with chemo, but the combination is too much.

There’s a treatment for this, an injection called Neulasta, that I can have in conjunction with my next three chemo treatments (by which I mean LAST THREE), that raises white blood counts. It of course has its own side effects, the main ones being sticker shock and bone pain from the marrow being stimulated. I’m hoping my insurance takes care of the first one, and that the latter isn’t too bad. Like everything else in this cancer business, people’s responses vary enormously, from being achy for a couple days to needing narcotics.

I was dreading this week’s chemo, since the last round was brutal. My anti-nausea meds aren’t cutting it, and while Monday and Tuesday were really not bad despite being infusion days, Thursday and Friday had me running for the bathroom. (Things that cause vomiting: drinking water; walking to the kitchen; walking to the bathroom; pretty much anything.) But I’d still rather get it over with than keep extending this out. My final treatment will now be the first week of May. Bah!

And I’d already had to rearrange everything, and now I’m doing it again. I keep finding things that are messed up by changing weeks, including the meeting this week that I didn’t prepare for because I couldn’t attend it, and now I can and I’m totally unready. And the medical appointment I had to cancel, and for which the next available opening was June, and which now I didn’t need to cancel at all.

I set up a bunch of time-consuming work projects to process while I was out this week so that I could work on them next week, and now I’m here at the computer and none of my stuff is ready for me to do anything.

With the Neulasta, at least there shouldn’t be any more health-related delays. We’re keeping the three week spacing for the remaining treatments since that is working for my platelet counts; there’s no Neulasta equivalent that boosts platelets. I just really want this over with, so I can get on with figuring out how my life is going to work now. (More on that later.)