Effective Chemotherapy

Dee's chemotherapy worked quickly. If you remember, I mentioned that she was in the hospital for a total of 23 days when she got her diagnoses. The first 7 days were spent figuring out what she had and then coming up with a plan once we got a hold of the great doctor that helped her. After two weeks of chemotherapy, she started losing her hair. She had very long, thick hair thanks to her Native American/Mexican heritage. You couldn't tell that she was losing by looking at her but every time she ran her hands through her hair, she came out with a handful of hair. This added to her depression, especially since she was awake a bit more. So she decided to take control of the one thing that she could, her hair. The NA on the hospital had a razor and was able to cut off all of her hair for her. She felt better about losing her hair when it was just little pieces going away. Plus she was able to get some cute little knitted caps that volunteers made for the patients. They were very colorful and she really liked them.

Besides taking out her hair, the chemotherapies immediately when to work on the cancer. By the time we left the hospital, the cancer was cleared out of her bone marrow and it was reproducing its own cells. It was working pretty good too because the chemo would knock the cells down and they would just come back. She was on shots to force her bone marrow to work on white blood cells first but once the shot wore off, it would work on everything else.

At the end of her 23 day hospital visit she was exhausted and the chemotherapy plan was stretched out ahead of her for months to come. The important thing was that she was alive and things were moving in a positive direction. Here is a pic of us just before Dee got out of the hospital. She was alert, her lymph nodes had gone down, and she was happy to be alive.

Dealing with the Cancer Diagnosis

When people would ask how do I feel or they would ask Dee how does she feel, we really couldn't answer. We were in shock. Dee was 28, we never thought about cancer. Even when we started researching her symptoms and saw cancer as a possibility, I was in denial. Dee knew something was seriously wrong but cancer wasn't foremost in her mind. The first cancer diagnosis was scary but we still thought that it would be cured and everything would be OK. Then we got all the details of the rhabdomyosarcoma. That information combined with the reality of all the blood and platelet transfusions she was getting seemed unreal, like it was the end of her life. She concentrated on one fact, that she would never be able to have a child after the chemotherapy. Almost every time she woke up, she talked about it. We had already decided to not have children, we had nieces and nephews plus we wanted to be free to travel a lot. Nevertheless she deeply felt the loss of choice and it really upset her.
She did spend a lot of time sleeping during her first days, she was in the hospital for a total of 23 days in the beginning. The doctors were worried about her but her body just needed sleep. When she was awake, she was depressed and crying if I wasn't there. I was trying to work but when her nurse pulled me aside to let me know that Dee was having a hard time during the day, I immediately talked to my boss. I knew that Dee didn't want to be on any more drugs than she had to be and if my sitting by her side was all that it took to keep her off of antidepressants, I was more than happy to do it. Although I had only been at my job a month or two, they had no problems letting me go down to 2 hours a day. Plus they let me start at 6 AM so that I could be at the hospital by breakfast time. When Dee was making the decision to go on the chemotherapy, I told her that I would be by her side no matter what decision that she made and I would help her all that I could. So I spent all day at the hospital, starting about 8:30 in the morning until she went to sleep around 10 or 11 at night. They had an internet hookup in the room so I was able to continue with school and continue researching. I think the fact that I was helping her, helped me deal with everything. In return it helped her because she didn't feel alone and didn't have to always deal with strangers by herself.
She contributes her ability to getting better to my being there for her. I think that it also had a lot to deal with the fact that we didn't dwell on the cancer diagnosis and how close to death she was. She was too close for us to do much about it in terms of death preparation so we concentrated on the chemotheraphy. We learned about blood tests so that we could watch what was going on inside her body. We concentrated on taking one day at a time and we were able to get through those very tough days after the diagnosis.