#chemo mention

[seraphic-sapphic-safehaven]

Hey, y'all. Please take the time to look at this link and donate if you can and are willing to! This is for my good friend's sister. Please help if you can, and please reblog this if you see it!!

Ms. Mary Jones Surgery Fund, organized by Amber Robinson

Hey everyone, Our very own Mary Jones is having her third surgery. She has been battli… Amber Robinson needs your support for Ms. Mary

[violet-amet]

Next year is going to be my fourth year in recovering from chemo. Wild. Though I feel that my hair is the same as it was before it. Heh.

[badolmen]

Little prayer request - my grandfather’s bone cancer and dementia have been getting rapidly worse over the past few months and he just started chemo yesterday. I want him to still be around when I go back home in the winter.

[ixellent]

An Account of Chronic Illness

Here’s what I did for the last month while I was waiting for my Crohn’s treatment, which was delayed nearly a month to the day due to a fuck up with insurance. Sometimes I just want people to know what it’s really like for some people to be sick with this disease. This is a non-graphic account of the last month and includes minor medical mentions.

I was getting sick as far back as the week before New Years because my original treatment date was the 4th, so I really haven’t been eating anything substantial since then. The once in awhile I did, I got even more sick, so. And for me with my Crohn’s, what that means is going to the bathroom a lot and being doubled over with abdominal pain, plus fatigue and trouble concentrating, long story short. 

I made/received a lot of phone calls about once a week trying to handle the situation but otherwise I was just waiting to hear back, waiting for paperwork, there’s nothing else I could do about those things - I did leave messages twice a week as well, for those people like “well you can check on your status, you can bug people, you can talk to your doctor” don’t start with me. There was a doctor’s appointment in there as well as part of the things I had to do to get my treatment. I just want you to know that I was doing what I was supposed to do and if there was something else I could do about it, I don’t know what that was and no one would tell me, and there are a lot of times when it’s just an endurance test. You just have to get your scheduled treatment with the paperwork in order or else you are so sick you are going to the ER, those are your options. It’s fucked up and that’s why we need Universal Healthcare god damnit.

At first I was still able to do work, so I finished up a new portfolio piece after the first week of the year, and started a couple things for friends thinking I would finish them up quick, update my portfolio and resume for a couple weeks maybe do a little job hunting, and be opening commissions back up at the end of January. Then I got REALLY sick. The abdominal pain was still intermittent but increasing, and I was already chained to my bathroom every day.

So I just started playing a lot of No Man’s Sky and other games because that’s all I could find the brain power to do, and for about a week all I did was play video games and read and clean my house and get my affairs in order because I knew what was coming. I stocked up on meal replacements and safe foods and tried to work my way through the last of my regular groceries.

Then I was in so much pain that I couldn’t focus on games, and I could barely move at all for the first half of the day. I could only sleep for a few hours at a time and I was always woken up by pain and discomfort every hour. The steroid taper they put me on to help me get to my treatment gave me a few good hours in the afternoon but that was it, and some days I was still so exhausted all I could do was sleep through those few good hours. I was scared that my inflammation might be causing a stricture/blockage at one point so I was drinking Coca Cola once a day because the carbonic acid dissolves most debris-based blockages by itself (that’s a fun fact for you all) and switched to an all liquid diet because I wasn’t taking chances. I can’t go to the hospital during COVID. I just wanted to get to my treatment. I kept myself pretty clean and showered despite it all, and cleaning my house when I could made a huge difference.

There were days I knew I could not drive safely, and when the day of my treatment came my sister had to drive me. There were times I was so bored but so trapped by pain all I could do was scroll through my phone. There was a day I half-deliriously bawled into the phone to my sister because I thought no one cared that I was slowly dying alone in my home. There was a day that the walk down one short flight of stairs to get essential supplies delivered had me out of breath. At my last chemo weigh-in on the 20th of November I was about 134lbs (stable for me). I was weighed again on January 7 at ~129lbs. At this one on the 2nd of February, when I finally got my chemo, I was 117lbs.

I don’t know how long the recovery will be this time. I know it will be more than a week and I am still so sick.

[tmntnerd2016]

Had Chemo today

It went well and helped with my pain and throwing up a bit so that’s great but now I just wait the couple days to see what side affects surface hopefully none do but I have things to manage it and honestly I’m feeling a lot better

@chaotic-loki-odinson @annaliaandtheturtles @fossilsandfeathers @frostbitten-written

[torque-witch]

Blood test morning.

Took about an hour because one of my Docs left out a test code. Couldn’t get the test for Humira antibodies because same Doc didn’t inform me I couldn’t take biotin supplements??

And then after two tries both veins dried up after two bottles and the phlebotomist had to call in someone else. I was buzzing so they laid me down and finally got 6 more.

I’m so fucking tired of this. Especially the damn Humira test. They’re trying to start me on low dose chemo before testing anything, even after saying if one of the tests is positive that we wouldn’t use that medication.

So going back in 2 days. 🙃🙃🙃

[fatgirldangerousworld]

I'm waiting for CT scan results (routine CT scan, expecting routine results, but it's always nerve-wracking), so here's the silly way my hair looks today. I have one of the stretchy headband things in it, and I used some curl enhancer. And no, I haven't dyed it at all--it grew back a slightly different color/pattern after chemo.

[dotingbat]

Had to come back to work today and everyone who knows that my medical emergency last week was an ectopic pregnancy is losing their mind over me being back to work before the literal chemotherapy they injected me with has cycled through my body lmao

Hey guys I hate it too I’m tired and my body feels weak but GOTTA MAKE MONEY to pay bills and die

They won’t let me go on leave and pay me so if I go on leave there’s no pay and no benefits 😃