Round 6 Day 1

Today I started my last full round of chemo. My port actually bled enough today for them to get a blood sample; the only trouble I had with it was at the end when they do the heparin lock, for some reason, the port didn’t want to take the heparin. They had to fiddle around with it, pushing the needle in deeper, wiggling it around; great fun!

I did speak to the doctor today about the sheath that’s formed over the end of the port-a-cath’s line, he said he suspects if you looked at most of them you’d see the same thing as it’s the body’s natural reaction to attempt to encompass a foreign body. He figures as long as it runs ok tomorrow, we should be ok.

One thing that has me really terribly annoyed is the fact that the clinic has somehow forgotten to schedule my next appointment. When I was in two weeks ago they’d told me they would take care of it, when I went in today they weren’t even aware I’d be in tomorrow for Day 2 of my R-CHOP treatment; I’ve been going here for 12 weeks now; my treatment doesn’t vary itself it’s quite standardized. Today they told me they couldn’t schedule my next appointment within the doctor’s timeframe (two weeks from today) because they didn’t have any appointments and don’t have any even three weeks out. I don’t know what’s happened to the place. They’re seemingly falling apart. In my husband’s words “They couldn’t organize a root in a brothel” — root is Australian for…. well you know. I just don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve been nice, calm, rational Jackie up to this point. If I go in tomorrow and they haven’t sorted this out I’m going to become She-Hulk… Jackie Smash Schedule! Seriously though, I’ve been a patient with a standarized treatment going in every two to three weeks regularly. They didn’t anticipate the appointments I would need. I feel maybe I’m somehow a substandard cancer patient; I’m not dying and so don’t need palliative care. In fact I’m seemingly cured, I’ve never looked particularly sick, though I’m tragically bald, still for my treatment to work as it should I need to complete it within a particular time period, and I will just say here and now they will have an appointment for me in two weeks; even if loud, obnoxious, indignant cancer patient Jackie has to rear her tomato red, shiny bald head and raise the roof of that place. I sound angry, don’t I? I’m a bit at the end of my tether after being badly jerked around over last treatments’ blood transfusion. I don’t particularly care to be jerked around, and since my accounts with them are currently all up to date, I do feel I have a bit of a right to expect a certain level of care.

Anyway, I’m not really angry, just averse to being jerked around, well more than averse; I refuse to allow it. It’s my health at stake, and I’m not going to risk that so that I can appear polite. I am polite, but if you step all over me, you can expect to see the ugly side of me. I’ve said it before, you have to be your own advocate when it comes to your health, because no one else will be.