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When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer, I was terrified. But as I proceeded through treatment, I slowly started to realize that I can do this. For years I had heard horror stories of chemo and it's side effects and my imagination took hold and made those stories even worse. I found out, however, that the reality when I finally faced it, did not live up to the terror in my imagination. I wrote up this walkthrough of a day of chemo in with the idea that maybe it would help give some newly diagnosed cancer patient some hope that, although it sucks, they can get through it. I'm cross posting this in full from my blog in hopes of helping even more readers. Please pass this along if you have friends or family members that are facing cancer treatment.
Ever wondered what a day of chemotherapy was like for a cancer patient? I thought I'd bring you along today, and give you a snapshot of what cancer treatment looks like. I hope its helpful to the newly diagnosed. Obvious disclaimer: of course, every patient's treatment is different, and each cancer treatment center is different.
6:00 AM
Alarm goes off. I'm supposed to get up and take my pills. I'm on a new type of chemo that requires me to take a pill 12 hours, 6 hours, and 1 hour before the chemo infusion starts (the first pill was taken care of last night). I hit the snooze button.
Again.
And again.
And again.
7:00 AM Actually get out of bed and take the pill. Oops. Time to get the baby and myself ready to go.
7:45 AM Mom shows up to take us in for treatment. She even packed me a lunch for my long day. Thanks Mom.
8:15 AM
I arrive at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. Mom takes the baby with her for the day. Check in for Port Access. (Instead of having an IV put in every time I go in, I have a port that is installed under the skin near my left collarbone. I know a lot of people hate having the port, but I love it. It's so much nicer than the IVs and for some reason, getting an IV going on me is really difficult.) After the port access is installed I go around for the rest of the day with these tubes dangling from my chest. 
Break into moms lunch while I'm waiting.
9:30 AM Blood draw for MUGA scan (Multi Gated Acquisition Scan). They take my blood, make it radioactive, and later they will return it to me, then they can track the blood as it makes its way through my heart to determine it's efficiency. Several of the agents in my chemo are known to cause some heart damage to a small percentage of patients. This scan is scheduled periodically to determine how well my heart is handling the chemo, and whether we need to make any adjustments. This isn't part of my normal chemo routine.
waiting . . .
waiting . . .
waiting . . .
10:05 AM
The machine that does the MUGA scan is a long narrow bed (generous term) with an arm holding a 2"x2" tablet that looks something like a small film holder for an x-ray machine. When I lay down, the radiologist attached leads and wires to my abdomen and chest, then another tech came in and they both verified that the blood they are giving back to me, now radioactive, actually belongs to me. The the treated blood goes back in through the port. Then she covered me up with a warmed blanket, they have blanket warmers all over the place here and they are really good about making sure you don't catch
