Well the new portacath has been in a week and, miracle of miracles, it's working! Currently it's dribbling Cetuximab into me very slowly as apparently it's not a drug you really want to rush as very bad things happen if you do.
After this comes the Irinotecan, dubbed "Evil Irene" by some patients which can be given a bit faster but which has its own particularly fun side effect, acute cholinergic syndrome which the medical literature cheerfully notes "can be fatal." To combat this they give you a shot of atropine first which, equally cheerfully, is the active ingredient in the poisonous plant Deadly Nightshade, also called Belladonna. So they give you a poison to counteract the other poison.
Isn't chemotherapy wonderful.
After that it's a simple matter of pumping you full of Folinic Acid which serves to give the next drug, Fluorouracil (5FU) a leg up. That's a nice drug and only gives you the squits, make you throw up, stops your bone marrow making white cells and platelets so you're prone to neutropenic sepsis and/or bleeding uncontrollably and also throws in palmar-plantar syndrome and mouth ulcers into the mix. Oh and the most bone weary fatigue you've ever had.
It had better be working or I'm going to be one mightily pigged off dragon.
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