Chemical Hazards

CHEMICAL HAZARDS

I guess one of the reasons I don't take my injuries too seriously is that I have seen real suffering up close. Anything I have been through is nothing compared to the pain and stress of cancer treatment. I don't think I could put on as brave a face as my wife when she had cancer fifteen years ago.

The bone cancer was discovered. She went through two major surgeries and the recovery process, and was now missing parts of three of her ribs. But the worst was yet to come.

Chemotherapy is designed to kill cancer cells lurking in your body, but it almost kills the patient, too. She was on a special protocol designed by the top doctors in the world, and after the first treatment she was so sick she almost quit.

We called the doctors and they decided she could probably get by on a reduced dose, but she would still have to go through six courses of treatment.

Even getting ready for the chemotherapy involved surgery. She had to have a sub-dermal catheter which would stay in her body for the course of treatment. It looked like a doctor's stethoscope end, and they buried it under her skin just below her right clavicle. It was a bump about an inch around, and when they wanted to administer the chemotherapy, they would strap a fanny pack full of the chemicals to her hip and run a tube from it to her catheter. She would then go back to school and teach the rest of the day as the chemical coursed through her body.

Here's the strangest thing anyone said to us during the chemotherapy ordeal. Since she would be carrying around the treatment with her during the day, the oncology nurse said, "Don't get this on your skin."

The nurse was worried she may spring a leak during the day and have the chemicals get on bare skin. Now think about this for a moment. During chemotherapy you are pumping deadly chemicals throughout your body which are not supposed to get on your skin?

It made us both laugh out loud. It seemed so insane that this was the way where you could kill cancer, by almost killing the patient.

Getting the chemo was the easy part. Enduring the effects was so hard that Debbie wanted to quit several times, and almost couldn't make it through the entire treatment.

After the first treatment, her hair fell out. It would come out in clumps into her hand, and she just tossed it into the garbage can. By the end of the week she was mostly bald. The hairdresser shaved off the rest.

Guys can have a bald head and no one thinks anything about it. But as soon as I see a bald woman I now think chemotherapy. I even think this if I see a woman wearing a scarf which completely covers her head. But the good news is that Debbie has a beautiful bald head.

The chemotherapy treatments would so devastate Debbie's body that sometimes she would need to go to the hospital for fluids and monitoring. She would also sometimes need to get Nupogen treatments to boost her white blood cells.

Here's a strange medical twist. If you are getting chemotherapy, you can't get the treatment if your white blood count is too low, which is one of the purposes of chemotherapy. So if the chemotherapy is working, your white blood count goes down. But if it gets too low, you can't get the treatment.

So cancer patients get a treatment to raise their white blood cell count, so they can go back in later and get chemotherapy which will lower their white blood count again. There must be an easier way to do this.

One time Debbie had an especially bad reaction to the fourth or fifth treatment. She was in the hospital in a lot of pain, and I think the staff had given her too much morphine. She was struggling to breathe, and several times she stopped breathing.

I would gently shake her and tell her to keep breathing. There was equipment in the room which would have alerted the nurses if I hadn't been there, but it was one moment in this miserable process when I felt like I was actually helping.

About the only other thing I could do was give her ice chips when she was in the hospital, which ended up being 10 or more trips. The doctors and nurses did a great job, organized and prepared in a way which is truly amazing to see.

When I think about the advances in science, medicine, and technology, I can’t wait to see what the future will bring. Join me as we journey into a future of possibilities.

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