First chemo: Check that off our life experiences list.

Bill is sleeping right now, so I might have to cut this short, but wanted to report that the first experience of having chemotherapy is now officially over!

So far, the side effects have not kicked in, but we were warned that those could happen any time from now until a couple of days from now, so we are waiting.

He only had ONE of his chemicals today: Gemcitabine--the gentler of the two.

He has to go back tomorrow for most of the day (about 11 am until about 4 pm) and will receive BOTH chemicals at once--Gemcitabine and Cisplatin. The Cisplatin is the sledgehammer drug, and he has to be ready for ANYTHING once that is pumped into his arm.

They gave him 3 different medicines to prevent nausea. He takes them every 6 hours. So far, no nausea at all.

[At this point, he woke up and was hungry for tuna casserole, so I made that for him, and he has now eaten it with no ill effects. Yay! He is lying on the sofa in the living room, watching baseball. Life still seems normal.]

Tomorrow, I'll write more about what it's like to actually have chemotherapy put into yourself.

So far, it's pretty much indistinguishable from sitting in an airport waiting for your plane, except that you're not anywhere near an airport, and you're not waiting for a plane, and you're not in an airport chair, but rather in a big blue recliner chair and you have a tube running out of the back of your hand, and that tube is connected to a metal pole that has bags of cold, colorless, clear stuff hanging from them, which is dripping down the tube into your hand, exterminating cancer cells in your body, left and right, and there are nurses everywhere being really sweet to you, and you're in a hospital, and there are lots of other people with cancer near you, of all ages, and they are also connected to tubes and poles, and at the end of the day, you don't get on a plane.

But in every other way, yeah, it's EXACTLY like sitting in an airport waiting for a plane.

;)