Chemotherapy is a personal experience. (Chemo Survival Guide Part 1)
Photo by penmachine via Flickr. (Creative Commons. Some rights reserved by author.)
For most people outside the world of cancer, chemotherapy is just one particular medical treatment that takes care of all cancers. They do not know about all the different versions of chemo and generally think that only dosage and frequency are changed from one patient to the next. However, this is far from the truth. Chemotherapy is the cumulative name given to quite a lot of medical procedures used to treat cancer. As long as it’s a substance being inserted (through a variety of mechanisms) into the patient’s body to treat cancer, it will be called chemotherapy. Just as there are hundreds of different diseases under the cancer banner, there are a wide variety of chemotherapy treatments. In other words, if three chemo patients were to meet at a cancer treatment center, it is likely that their treatments are completely different procedures.
As a result of this, and complemented by the differences inside each of our bodies, each cancer patient undergoes different experiences with the chemotherapy process (although there are similarities between patients). When most people think of chemo side effects, probably the most common one to come to mind is the hair loss. Chemo patients are supposed to be bald, right? The answer to this question is “No.” While a lot of chemotherapy patients lose their hair (me included) during treatment, a good portion of patients go through it with minimal or no hair loss. Others never suffer from the effects of nausea, another common chemo side effect. It is important for the cancer patient to find information on the treatments and side effects for his/her particular kind of cancer and chemotherapy combination.
I think I learned the most about different chemo treatments while waiting each morning for chemo to start in the treatment center’s waiting room. For about an hour before the chemo treatments started, most of the morning patients would be in the same room talking to each other. You learned the different experiences everyone had with chemo. Some patients would enter treatment once a month for an hour, while others would spend an entire week connected to a machine for eight hours a day. Some patients would have uncontrollable vomit, while others looked as if it was just any other day for them.
The point I’m trying to get across is that, as a cancer patient, you need to understand that your chemotherapy experience will be your own. My chemotherapy is not the same as your chemotherapy or her chemotherapy. Even if two patients shared the same treatments, chances are the reactions would be totally different. You need to understand this as you enter treatment because sometimes patients feel like something is wrong with the treatment when they start getting symptoms that don’t fit what they heard another patient say happened to them. You have to remember that chemo isn’t like taking Tylenol Multi-symptom for a cold. You don’t feel better afterwards. No, chemo is basically poison-taking and your body will react to it in varied and unexpected ways. Of course, you need to inform your oncology professional (nurse or doctor) of your symptoms, but don’t feel like there is something wrong with the treatment when symptoms you never heard of start happening. Remember; don’t judge yourself by how other patients are reacting. You experience is your own and while you may have the worst side effects of any patient in the treatment center, you may be healing quicker than anyone else.
Monday in Helpoon’s Chemotherapy Survival Guide: “Chemotherapy is about YOU!”
Other posts in the CSG series:
