Feb 6 - Chemo again

Started the day with Radiation at 7:30, then over to Chemo. Found out that the Creatinine was "down" to 1.79 or so and therefore Cisplatin was not an option. So today I received 150mg of Carboplatin in a simple 30 min, 250ml saline drip. I also got a simple 250ml saline drip. (Far lower than the 1.5 liters I'd gotten the prior 7 days -- and less time!) "They" say the nausea and side effects won't be as bad, but I'm not taking any chances and I started on the overlapping schedule of Zofran and Phenergrin as soon as I got home. They also gave me some steroids there so I have a bit of an appetite today and I've "chowed down" on a yogurt (Strawberry Yoplait), a cup of egg drop soup, 2 "boosts", and cup of Trader Joe's Carrot/Ginger soup. Let me state that everything tastes uniformly bad...I'm after "ease of eating". I do my best to pass this food directly from the spoon to the back of my tongue and swallow straight away. Any swishing around the mouth causes me to "taste" -- and that just ruins it! Looks like from here on out, it'll be Carboplatin Wednesdays. Not sure if there's 2 more doses on the cards, or 3. Currently my last day of radiation is a Wednesday -- the 26th -- so it doesn't seem necessary to do chemo on that day -- if the point of the chemo is to enhance the effectiveness of the radiation. I guess we'll see. The Radiation folks called this morning. They want me twice tomorrow -- first for my normal treatment at 7:30, then at 8:00 they want to "re-scan" or "re-calibrate" the treatment (due to weight loss). When you get smaller, things move relative to the absolute placement of the X-ray guns in the "Tomatherapy" machine. This should be the final calibration (they did this already at 2-weeks due to the big weight loss in the first week.) I estimate that the total weight loss remains under 20lbs, but there are 3 more weeks of treatment...plus several weeks after where things don't actually get much better quickly. On top of Dry Mouth...and Taste issues...my throat is starting to hurt full time. Last week we got a "Miles Mixture" to help with that, but for some reason, the ingredients were: Nystatin, Doxycyclene, Cortisol, and Benadryl. No Lidocane or Benzocane...? Possibly, the focus was on keeping the Thrush from coming back. We asked for something with a numbing agent and they handed me a bottle of Lidocane. It is a very viscous product that you put in the back of the mouth and swallow. First try (this morning), I put it on a spoon and put way back....triggering my gag reflex....which went full bore when the Lidocane didn't actually "go down" so much as sat on the back of my throat. Spent the next ten minutes in the bathroom heaving my near-empty stomach contents out. So, we called to get Lidocane in a different form - which we can pick up tomorrow. It's like my mama used to say, "If it's not one thing, it's another" (or maybe someone else's mama used to say that.... :-)