Read Death....Really????

Sitting in these outpatient infusion rooms getting pumped full of toxins isn't how I like to spend my days but as I look around at the people, with their head scarves and eyebrow-less faces, that file in and out throughout the day I feel lucky.

I used to think that chemotherapy was chemotherapy. That there were different drugs for different diseases but that they all made your stomach lurch and hair fall out. Imagine my surprise to find out all of the subtle intricacies of how chemo works and why some side effects aren't as universal as I once thought.

It should be noted that I am in no way a chemo expert but I try to pay attention to the patients around me with their IV bags of "life saving" medicine. It strikes me as supremely odd that medications that are supposed to make a positive impact on your health seem to have the worst nicknames...Red Death?? Really?

When I come in for my infusions I sometimes have to wait hours while my chemotherapy drug is being "mixed". At first this didn't make sense to me. I come from a non-chemo world where IV drugs are mixed up, put into IV bags, shipped, and stored. Apparently this is not the case in chemo world.

There was one day when I was waiting for what seemed like hours upon hours for the pharmacy to mix my chemo so I finally asked my nurse why it was taking so long. I had heard from a friend, a nursing student, that during one of her classes she had seen the gloves that the pharmacist had to use when dealing with chemotherapy drugs and that they were no joke but nothing prepared me for what my nurse told me. This treatment that I'm getting...that all of us in this infusion center are getting...is so potent that when it's being mixed the pharmacist is wearing what can most accurately be described as a HazMat suit.

Why the precautions, you might ask?? Chemical burns. The stuff can't even be inhaled without leaving a wake of destruction. The more potent drugs can eat through the plastic IV bags (hence the maid-to-order chemo).

So that's what's making its way into me as I type this but I feel lucky. I tell Robbie all the time that my MS/chemo isn't going to kill me...life will simply be more challenging.

I feel lucky because I have something that so many of the other patients here don't....a future.