Day +110

I am fine today. I would like to continue sharing my third chemotherapy experience at UH.

I developed fever, cold and chill on 16, February 2006, one day after I received Amphoteracin B. The nurse told me this could be due to reaction to the drug and it should be alright if the fever did not persist.

I planned to enjoy reading a novel called “天龙八部”(The Demi Gods and Semi Devils), which is written by Jinyong (金庸). This novel is very long, but I could not make much progress because I was sleepy all day long.

My third round of chemotherapy started on 20, February 2006 (Day 1). The first two rounds of chemotherapy were called induction chemotherapy. If a patient managed to enter complete remission after the induction chemotherapy, he/she will be given a few rounds of consolidation chemotherapies which uses two types of drug called VP16(Etopside) and Ara-C over a duration of four days. VP16 was given once a day and each dose took one hour to finish, while Ara-C was given twice a day with each dose took three hours to finish.

During the first 4 days of chemotherapy, I was very busy receiving different types of drug. You might think that those who were busy should be the nurses, not me because they had to prepare and administer drug to me. Yes, I supposed to relax but I worried bubbles generated within the plastic tube would go into my vein which would result bubbles in my blood stream. These bubbles might be generated when the drug reacted with the plastic. So I had to “jaga” (monitor) all tubes that were connected to my PICC. If I spotted bubbles inside them, I would knock them off immediately before they went into my vein. I am now as good as the nurse in knocking off the bubbles :-)

See you next post :-)