A Three Hurricane Evening

I got home yesterday somewhere around 1:30 in the afternoon. Keeping with the idea of small meals and drinking lots of water I had something to eat. At this point I was feeling fine but a bit tired. Around 3:00 I decided to take a nap. At 4:00 PM I woke up and that was when the fun started. It felt like I had been on a drinking binge without the benefit of drinking. Nausea, cold sweats, stomach cramps... the whole nine yards.

So I went downstairs and crashed on the couch. Sue tried to call the medical oncologist but could only get voice mail. Fortunately the nurses at the hospital gave me their number as well so she called there. They were able to get through and have the nurses from the oncologists office call. They said to take the drugs the radiation people had given me for nausea with the shots for protecting the saliva glands. That had some effect but no much. Sue called again but only got voice mail so she put a call into the doctors service. After about a half hour he called back and said he would call in a prescription to the local pharmacy. Of course that took even more time and in all it took about 3 hours to get the other prescription. Its some sort of steroid that helps the other medication. Between the two it seemed to get under control though I am still "stomach aware" as one web site put it.

The doctor was a bit surprised by the quick reaction to the Cisplatin. I guess normally this type of stuff doesn't turn up until the next day. Who knows, maybe that means it is working faster. So this morning I am off to another radiation treatment. Hopefully the effects of the Cisplatin will fade over the next two days.

So what is the hurricane reference about? I wanted to come up with a way to communicate how the side effects feel without getting into all the gory details so I devised the hurricane reference chart. A hurricane is a drink they serve in New Orleans that has about 4 shots of rum in it and a grain alcohol spritzer. In my youth a friend of mine and I at a sporting event consumed 4 of these. Needless to say we were not fit for much the next day. This wasn't has bad as that but it was up there.