History of Ginger- (3)

A lot of craziness has been going on in this funny little life of mine. I don't quite want to go out of order and explain what's going on right now without you knowing why it's happening.

So, I left off with 12 more rounds of chemo to happen.

I began 2 new types of chemo: Methotrexate and Cyclophosphamide.
I geared up and dove head first back into the world of chome and hospitals and sickness. As I said before, the first 4 rounds really weren't too bad. I could handle it. It had a system and a schedule and I was well half the time. I really felt like I couldn't complain too much.

Well, when I started the new drugs, I could start complaining. Things went from "you have cancer" to "you don't have cancer anymore but we are making sure there isn't anything left" but chemo doesn't just effect the cancer. It is poison to the whole body. During all this time I'm sick as a dog, have terrible mouth sores, no more white blood cells so I wasn't allowed to go to school or in public very much, on crutches or in therapy, and have the stamina of a narcoleptic.

My kidneys started failing. They were pretty beat up by the first drugs but the second set really threw them over the edge. My nephrologist (kidney doctor) changed up the Cyclophosphamide to Iphosfamide to help save them. I currently live in a state of stage 4 kidney disease and this past August I had a spout of acute kidney failure. (That means they fail but come back. Just an episode... don't worry, no dialysis or anything came from that)

I was not allowed to walk on my new knee for 3 months to allow the bone to grow around the metal to keep it stable. I was supposed to be doing physical therapy every day to help build the muscle but when you are that sick, getting out of bed to work out just doesn't seem like a good idea! I could kick myself now for not doing it because maybe things would be different now and maybe my knee would have worked for the last ten years. Fact of the matter is though, that I didn't do any of that.  And as any good teenage girl is, I was stubborn. If you told me to do something that made me not want to do it. I think it was more of a control thing. I had no control over any part of my life at that point but boy could I say no to doing therapy! young girls, if you read this.... it doesn't help anyone. And you get mad at yourself years later that you were so dumb. Get over it and do whatever you are supposed to be doing.

Woops! Stepping off the soap box. Got a little carried away there. Where was I? Oh yes, how horrible my life was! By June I was starting to have to push back chemo dates because my blood counts would not get high enough in time. You see, before you can have poison injected into you, you must have enough blood to stay alive. I had transfusions pretty much every other week. Basically, you go sit in a room in the clinic and watch a movie with 19873502 blankets on while you get the ice cold blood transfused. I will say, you feel great after having one! But man is it cold! And the cold is in your blood stream so its a cold you can't escape from. Weird feeling. I'm full of other people's blood! One time, there wasn't enough blood in the bank to give me so I had to be admitted to the hospital to make sure I didn't get sick or anything and they would try to get more blood for me. Little tip- if you have you family and friends go donate blood, you don't get that blood. Really, it doesn't matter if they do or don't because it doesn't move you higher on the list either! You still get no blood! And I am a universal donor type of blood, not universal receiver so they are always short on my type of blood. Whew, I sound like a Cullen with all this blood talk.

Anyway, if you don't have good blood counts they can't give you the chemo. It was taking me longer and longer to get to those levels. First, it was just a couple of days, then it started to become weeks. With the first types of chemo I had 2 weeks of being healthy every time before I had to go back and get poisoned. The big thing to remember is, when you aren't getting you levels up, as soon as you do and are able to get more chemo, you go. You don't get any healthy buffer time. That's when you start wearing down mentally.

As you can imagine I was just drained. Mind, body, and now spirit. I started to feel like I was loosing the will to fight. It was so hard to make myself eat or go to therapy or just try to get well. I started thinking, "I can't do this anymore." Once you start thinking that, you can't stop. It just gets harder. I never said it out loud with any authority. I would jokingly say things like "I'm so over this" or "I cannn't dooooo thiiiiis" but no one took me seriously. In my house, what the doctor says is golden. My dad is a doctor and my mom a nurse and we trusted our doctors with my life (literally HAHAHA) so if he said 12 rounds and I was on 7, I had 5 more to go and that was that.

We got to Houston for my 8th round, 2 weeks later than was planned because I had been sick. As my nurse started to access my port (basically it is an IV that it permanent around the area of your collar bone and they can access it with a long needle so you don't have to have IV's in your arm all the time) I started making my half joking-half serious comments about not wanting to do this anymore expecting one of the many responses I got at home: a roll of the eyes, an overly excited "only 4 more after this!",  a large sigh and a stern "Devon", a "I know, but you have to,"or my favorite: and angry "Do you want to die?"

 To my surprise, my nurse actually took me seriously!