My first chemo

Last night (they were running a bit late) I had my first chemo treatment. The chemicals are quite strong, and I was vey pleased that the nurse was experienced using a cannula to administer them (if there is a problem with the cannula they can burn the tissue). For the geeks among you, the drugs were Vincristine (a colourless liquid), followed by Daunorubicin (a bright red liquid). A lot of saline is used too!

In addition to the chemo and the myriad of prophylactics (including IV anti-sickness), I am also taking a corticosteroid called Dexamethasone. This is taken orally in ten very small pills. The steroids are supposed to make you very alert and sleepless, but I slept pretty normally. I am taking these four days on / three says off for the duration.

Despite the myriad of side-effects that are listed, I am pleased to say I only had a mild stomach cramp. All that cold fluid injected into your blood does make you cold though, and I needed a hot coffee afterwards to get warm!

The good news is that the predicted period of well being has come to pass (largely due to the steroids). I have not taken any pain relief since yesterday lunch, and I am in no pain now. I will enjoy it while it lasts.

Whilst I was chatting with the chemo nurse about the treatment, we strayed to the topic of transplants, and at last I think I understand why the risks are greater. During induction, the doses of chemo are strictly limited, according to weight and height (they weigh me every day). This is to allow the bone marrow to recover and continue producing cells. However, for a transplant, the doses are limited only by the ability of the recipient to cope with them; the idea is to shut down the bone marrow's ability to function, and then reboot it with the harvested donor stem cells. It says this in the literature and the web sites, but until now I did not really grasp it fully.

Later on, the registrar returned to inform me that the analysis of my cancer indicates that I have Philadelphia-positive ALL, which was to be expected, and why a transplant really is required for me. They treat this with an extra drug called Gleevec (or Imatinib) taken orally.

Rose returned for another long visit which was nice. She was able to buy me some sandwiches to supplement my lunch. In addition to the alertness, the steroids also boost appetite (later to be suppressed by other drugs apparently).

Just before Rose arrived, I had a reflexology session by the complimentary therapy team! I have never had any of these self-pampering things before, but needless to say it was very pleasant and relaxing. This complimentary therapy is available to all cancer patients funded by a charity. She asked me what I normally do to relax - crossword puzzles I replied; it soon became clear that this was not quite the answer she was looking for!

I installed both kindle and iBooks, but the paucity of titles on iBooks makes it of only very limited use. I bought a book from kindle to get started, but the kindle app is not as nice as iBooks. I suspect it will be easier for Amazon to improve their app then for Apple to get 750,000 titles on iBooks! It looks like with only 3G access, TV is not going to be viable, but I have not verified it as I still cannot get the BBC iPlayer to work (it did play a radio show once, but not even that any ore, it just keeps hanging). They have a way to go with mobile.