Chemo and pizza anyone?

Two weeks ago when Jeannie did her first chemo and was so nauseated one of the nurses told her to try starting her anti nausea medication 24 hours prior to the next treatment. There are actually two drugs she’s taking, one is a once a day that is only three days in duration. The other she can take as needed. Seems to have been excellent advice. Same as last time she went to work and did her normal Thursday. But last time she called me and told me I was on my own for dinner. This time she came home with a pizza from Planks. First time she ever had it. I hadn’t had it in years. I’ll see how I feel in the morning after the gluten intake. But it tasted damn good and it didn’t seem to bother her a bit. After pizza it was a walk through the neighborhood with a couple grateful dogs (chemo days seem to be particularly sucky days for the canine residents of the household).

Today was the first day with the Penguin cold caps that are worn before during and after chemo to protect the hair follicles. If she’d known about these she would have had them from the start and has had some hair loss (but she definitely started out with quite a lot of hair). To and from and during treatment these are stored in dry ice and changed every 20 to 30 minutes. This makes for a couple rather heavy coolers so I opted to buy new ones with wheels last night. All the staff members we talked with save for one had never seen these before. The nurse who had was working at another facility at the time and said they worked for the one woman she saw use them (that was welcome news). So now there are a bunch of people at the center interested to see how well these work. Here’s Jeannie wearing one during her infusion. 

You know you’re in a medical facility when a head dress like that doesn’t draw stares, although it did get some double takes. Jeannie’s pre treatment blood work was also very strong. In fact it was all normal.The only downer was she'd lost four pounds. And she is eating well. The last few nights she's even chowed on some Handel's ice cream, which is anything but low fat. 

Oh by the way I noticed that when she got home from the treatment she did some laundry. It'll probably be an early bedtime tonight since on the nights before chemo neither one of us seems to sleep very well. Both times now I've slept worse than her, to the point you'd think it was me getting the treatment. We were up today at five, all part of getting one of the earliest appointments and getting it over and done with so she can be on with her day. For a minute it didn't look like we were going to get that lucky for the next time on the 24th but Heidi pulled off some scheduling magic and helped make it an all round good morning (good as a chemo morning can be).