me

I am thrilled to announce that I am done with chemotherapy!

In November last year, I noticed an unusual bruisey bump on my chest. I didn’t remember running into anything that would explain the bump and it was getting worse not better so I went to the doctor to get it checked out. After a slew of tests, I was diagnosed with stage 3 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in early December.

I had a softball size tumor nestled in with my heart and lung and pushing out between my ribs which was the bump I could see and feel. Even having been through it myself, I will never understand how people can have these huge tumors and not even know it. Had mine not poked out between my ribs, it wouldn’t have hurt and I wouldn’t have noticed.

Chemotherapy began in mid-December and I’ve been going every two weeks since then. After eight treatments, another slew of tests was done and they showed no more sign of the cancer. The tests are only accurate down to 1cm so I needed two more months of chemotherapy to be sure any possible areas smaller than 1cm were also eliminated.

I get a three week break now but it’s still a long road ahead. The tumor is dead but it’s still mostly there, so I need 18 sessions of radiation therapy scheduled for June and July to get rid of the mass itself.

Hopefully life will start getting back to normal come August.

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So I’m three months into a six months of scheduled treatment for Hodgkin’s Lymphona and currently require an IV or blood test on average of slightly more than one time a week. To borrow some World of Warcraft jargon, all of my veins are now on cooldown and if they try to reuse any of them one of the following debuffs more than likely applies: collapsed, exploded, spasmed, sclerosis, retracted, or “we got the needle in the vein but for some reason no blood is coming out” because I’d apparently also be totally useless as a food source to a vampire at this point.

Occasionally, they can get a usable vein on the first try but just as often it’s taking three tries. Thus my doctor is strongly suggesting I get an IV port which would be installed in my chest or near my elbow and provide access to larger, deeper veins. In addition to having the benefit of not being poked with a needle so often, receiving my chemotherapy treatment would be less painful because the veins it would be going in to would be larger so the pain would be distributed more lightly over a larger area.

The major drawbacks are:

• this would be the only thing related to the cancer that would leave me with an external scar
• I’d have a hunk of plastic/metal in my skin as a constant reminder that I have cancer
• last week when I was at my check up, another patient went into cardiac arrest while having their port installed (granted, the average patient in that department is 2-3x my age)

But after 3 months of being poked with a needle (which I hate) two or three times a week, I’m finally leaning towards the port. The idea is made slightly more palatable by this recent XCKD comic which when it first came out I thought was amusing but now I think it’s really funny in that I’m laughing like a manic because it’s now so true that I don’t know what else to do sort of way.

I think a USB port would be way more useful in the long term too. I’d never have to worry about finding a place to plug in my iPhone again.

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