Fludara Juice

Monday arrived, I got up early, made a lunch and left the house and drove to my oncologists office. I checked in at the front desk and walked back to the infusion room. I found a chair and placed my belongings next to it. I was ready for more treatments with a different type of chemo. This time it would be a little different. I would receive these treatments for 5 days, everyday of the week.

I sat down and waited for the nurse to come over. This time it was a new nurse, and she came over to get me “hooked up”. She rolled over her cart and sat next to my chair. She tied the tourniquet around my arm and proceeded to try to tread a needle into a vein in the top of my hand. I had a bad feeling about this IV, it did not seem like it was in my vein. I tried to tell the nurse that it was not in my vein, she ignored me and went ahead and pushed a syringe full of saline solution into my vein. Immediately the skin on the top of my hand started to bulge and the nurse stopped injecting the saline solution. I told her I told you it wasn’t in the vein. She said sorry. Now my hand had a huge lump on it and it hurt like hell. The needle was not in the vein and all the solution had gone under my skin. They brought me a cold washcloth and I applied pressure to my hand trying to disperse the swelling. It was going to take a long time, like weeks, for my hand to return to normal. After around 15 minutes, a different nurse came over.  She took my other arm, tied the tourniquet on it, and again tried to insert a needle in my hand.  It took two tries, I was stuck two more times, but the third time was a success.

The nurse hooked me up to the bags of IV “Juice”. First a little more saline, then a bag of anti nausea, then a bag of a steriod and then a bag of my new cancer drug “Fludara”. This treatment was a little different because it only took around two hours. The Fludara bag was much smaller so the treatment was quicker. The nurse came over again and unhooked me from the IV and I was finished. My hand was hurting and I started to develop a big round purple swollen area on the top of my hand. Those are the breaks and sometimes that's how things go.You can't undo whats been done. Now I just had to heal up

I left the office and drove to work. The side effects were not too bad at first and I was able to make it through most of the day. I did leave early as I started to get a headache. I drove home. When I arrived home, my head was hurting, my hand was hurting and I was tied. I took some Tylenol and lay down.

I had four more treatments to go for the week. Tuesday I would do it all over again, bad hand and all................................