2/19/11 – Well, it has finally started. My hair has finally started to fall out. Don’t worry; I’m not supposed to lose all my hair. It is only supposed to thin. I cannot lie it is discouraging to lather your hair and see all this hair come out. Yes, I do normally shed but it is about 5xs more than normal. No, you can’t tell that my hair is thinning – at least not yet. It’s probably good that I don’t wash my hair every day!
Today I went shopping with Tara. I pretty much invited myself along – shopping? I’m there! – I remember riding in the car and telling Tara there wasn’t really anything I needed to buy. Well, I bought jeans, t-shirt, skirt, shoes, a purse, shoes, and a pair of pants and shirt for Todd! Who knew?! In my defense, there were a LOT of good deals.
Tara and I had already decided to go to Smoothie King after our shopping adventure. I’ve been trying to get my cold fix before chemo starts again. I looked it up online and learned the Smoothie King in Dawsonville was by Home Depot. Perfect! There’s a Home Depot across the street from the outlets. Tara and I get over there and realize that’s not the Home Depot they are talking about. It’s the Home Depot in Gainsville – 19.5 miles away. Did we say “Oh, well…” and just go home? Heck no! We went on our own little awesome adventure – “Shea and Tara’s Awesome Adventure” – and drove to Smoothie King. We basically drove through the country to get to civilization again and once we reached civilization we found Smoothie King – success! That was a lot of fun and the smoothie was really good too.
After that I headed home to relax. It had been a long day. I read somewhere one time that shopping can burn up to 500 calories. I think I reached that today because I shopped until I dropped!
I’ve been trying to think of things to do with my chemo that I haven’t talked about that you might be interested in. I know I mentioned my port – Pixie the Port – but I don’t know if I’ve explained how it works. I had a port put in because the chemo is supposed to be hard on your veins. Since I am having 12 treatments a port is recommended. The procedure to put the port in was an outpatient surgery and they made sure that the port was hooked up to a good vein – pretty sure it is a major artery (is that correct Nicole?). My port is blue – which I think is kinda cool since the colon cancer color is blue. My port is on my left side below my collar bone and above my heart. It is completely under the skin. You can’t see anything blue sticking out of me. The port pokes out just a little. I basically looks like a small bump – about the size of a nickel. If you were to see it the port might look like a slightly swollen bruised area but that’s just because it is blue. It doesn’t hurt me at all.
When I go into chemo I am hooked up to my medicine through the port. The access area of the port just looks like a small dot. When I asked where the port was exactly and the chemo nurse pointed to the dot I thought “That’s it?! All this for a dot?” The port prevents me from having to have IV’s all the time – which basically means it prevents me from being more of a diva than I am. I really hate IV’s. I love my port. I’m thinking about keeping it after everything is over just to get out of IV’s for the rest of my life. Everyone wants to know if I can feel the medicine going in through the port. When the chemo is going in I can’t feel it at all except for how it makes my body feel – tired and sometimes nauseous. After the port is accessed I am very comfortable. The port is my access spot for my IV line. The line hooks directly into my port. After I sit for my 4 hours and get my Oxaliplatin my IV is then hooked up to my pump of the 5FU that I go home with. I pump is constantly pumping the 5FU into my body through the port. I have an IV line that runs from the port to the pump – that’s why the pump goes everywhere with me. I run the IV line under my clothes so you can only see the little bit at the bottom of my shirt as it goes into my messenger bag that holds the pump. On Thursdays I go back to the cancer center and they remove the pump along with the IV line and de-access my port – meaning nothing is sticking out of me anymore. I’m then back to normal, at least as far as the port goes. Warning: I’ll post a picture of my port below. The lines above are just the incision from the surgery. The port access area is the little dot that I’m pointing towards. It’s not gross, but I just wanted to let you know.
I had a great day. I got a smoothie and some Totino’s pizza rolls! Yeah! They were wonderful. If I could have anything to eat I would like some chicken a dumplin’s, light on the chicken. My song of the day is “Forget You” simply because I’ve had it stuck in my head all day.
Night y’all!
 |
| Pixie the Port is the light dot below the incision line. |
No comments:
Post a Comment