Some notes from experience from the other side of a failed chemo:
- Not all ports are metal. Some are plastic.
- Not all chemo drugs have the same side effects; even within drugs, not all implementations have the same ingredients.
- Lots of chemo retrospectives talk about "nausea", but that's imprecise. Nausea and vomiting are separate things, and can be invoked separately. Some chemo drugs act on the vestibular system, which is the part of the nervous system that decides whether the body needs to vomit; some chemo drugs in your blood basically yell "PUKE PUKE PUKE" at your brain, and you vomit without nausea. Other chemo drugs do a number on dopamine or serotonin receptors, giving you intense nausea without the trigger to puke (but you might anyway). You can tell if you're in the latter bucket if chemo makes you absolutely hate chocolate, turkey, or other tryptophan- and tryamine-heavy foods — without the serotonin/dopamine boost in most chocolate, it's just a weird bitter taint that ruins sweet flavors. (Also, some chemo drugs make you REALLY crave fructose. By the bucket. Fruits, fruit-flavored candies, fruit juice, non-stop.)
- If you're young and relatively healthy, there's a decent chance you'll deal with your port closing up, especially if your cycles are 3+ weeks in length. Flushing the port is time-consuming; chemo is already hard to schedule around, but if you have port issues, nothing is ever going to take just 2-4 hours.
- Not sure if Charlie had to deal with pre-meds and post-med flush drips, but we did, and they're mandatory — even if you're unable to finish the infusion.
- Some chemo drugs have a slim chance of causing a severe reaction. If you're going to have one, it'll be within the first 10 minutes of the first infusion. If you have one, it might be a classic sudden allergic reaction, in our case Taxol caused the throat to close up, losing the ability to speak or breathe, treated with a heavy dose of Benadryl. Regardless of the specific reaction, if it's severe then it's a massive problem going forward, because your options are to either ditch the oncologist's first-choice drug or (with a ton of suffering) try to build up a resistance in a hurry. And yeah, if you're unlucky enough to have that reaction, you're very likely going to have that violent reaction in front of an audience of everyone else getting an infusion.
- One of the side-effects of chemo isn't listed here, and might not be a factor in his combo, but in general chemo has an eventual side effect point where it can't continue: the potential to cause nerve damage. This will look or feel a little like Parkinson's, with numb extremities, loss of motor functions, difficulty stringing together words/actions. At the first, slightest sign of this, chemo is over, sometimes for good. If the cancer isn't getting treated by then... good luck.
- Holding off on a cycle due to low white blood cell counts is a foreign concept to me. They ran tests and infusions between cycles to keep WBC counts up, but any cycle delays were considered suicidal. Again, might've been just our treatment course (and severity; we started at stage 4).
- This will vary between infusion centers, but as long as COVID is a problem, you can't rely on having in-person company with you, or contact with other people getting infusions (on account of everyone involved having massive immunity problems from the chemo). If you crave contact, bring a phone, a charger, and the longest possible cable you can get for that charger.