Part 6
"Side Effects"

The next day I went back to the doctors at 8 o’clock in the morning. That day went a little faster than the last. I seemed to fit in more with all of the patients now that my head was shaved. I still got a little sick around 12 o’clock, but I didn’t throw up. They gave me some more anti-nausea medicine and soon I felt better again. Food still tasted the same also. My mom brought me some Planet Burrito that day. I had a couple of good pee's in the “orange juice container”. Since it was very important that I urinated properly, my visits to the bathroom were always a big deal. The nurse would come back and tell me “that was a good pee.” It is bad if your body doesn’t drain itself of all that chemotherapy. You need to flush that stuff out. One problem that was starting to occur was the pain in my arm; the arm with the IV in it. I would have to get fresh hot pad put on it every couple of hours to keep the pain down. You could feel the pain all through your veins in that arm. Other than that, the first couple of days hadn’t been that bad.

By the end of the week my arms were really hurting. We scheduled an appointment with the doctor and she told me that I was going to need a port-a-cath. A “port” is like a straw that is connected to a main vein by your collarbone. The vein up there is about as thick as your pinky finger. You can’t even feel the chemo going in to this vein since it is so big. Some people get the port put into their arms but I was going to have mine at the top of my right chest. A port looks like the top of a coke bottle connected to a small tube. The small tube is then connected to your vein. The nurses would stick the IV into the “coke bottle top”, which was made of rubber. I thought this was a good idea so we scheduled an appointment for the next week.

I was really starting to feel the side effects of the chemo by the end of the week. For one, my tongue was now completely white. I guess the chemotherapy kills taste buds as well as cancer cells. Because of this, food started to taste really different. My favorite drink in the world, Coca-Cola, now tasted like flat syrup. Spicy foods had no effect on me anymore. Pretty much all food tasted funny. That’s bad for someone who really enjoys eating good food. I remember one time in the week when my dad brought me a nice Frisco Freeze hamburger for lunch and I couldn’t eat it because it tasted so bad. Another side effect I was starting to feel was tiredness. I would spend half of the time at the doctors sleeping. I usually slept 4-5 times a stay over there. I eventually made it through the week, but with a little help I received on that Wednesday night. I’ll talk about that next.

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