Chemotherapy

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The sparkle has rekindled in my mom’s eyes. She’s back. She was wiped out for a few days after her chemo treatment/iron shot (to combat her anemia). She never used to be anemic. Only since a year or so ago. It’s the chemo.

When you picture someone receiving chemo, you picture a frail, balled, pale person hooked up to a million plastic tubes with IV bags suspended from metal rolling contraptions, dripping liquid drop by drop by drop, day in and day out. That’s at least what I would picture if I didn’t know otherwise. Though that could be true in some cases, that’s not usually how it is. The metal rolling contraptions and IV bags are accurate, but the treatment generally only takes a couple hours and is done in what’s called an infusion lounge. Pretty swanky sounding, huh? It’s done at a clinic, not necessarily a hospital. You sit in a pretty comfy reclining chair, and depending on the day, massage school students come through and offer hand and foot massages. The lounges even have tea and coffee and snacks. It’s not half bad.

The lounge is not generally swarming with patients, but there is always a decent count. You won’t see too many people sitting with needles and tubes in their arm. That’s pretty old fashioned. These days, a lot of patients have what’s called a port. The port is surgically placed beneath the skin, just below the right collarbone. From the outside it just looks like a little bruised bump. Because my mom has lost so much weight, the port is much more visible and kinda looks like a beer cap somehow got under her skin. The port is where the needle goes in. It’s attached to a tube that runs inside one of the body’s major veins. Arm veins are very small and prone to collapsing after too much treatment, so the port method is more favorable. Some chemo treatments cause hair loss and some don’t. Some cause allergic reactions, some don’t. Some cause nausea and constipation, some don’t. And, some are ingested in pill form rather than injected. Chemo is like nail polish. You just gotta put it on to know what it’s gonna look like.