Day -4: Chemo Underway ... on Friday the 13th!

Are you superstitious?

I'm prone to being superstitious. I once burned a pair of dice as a teenager because I thought they were giving a disproportionate amount of high numbers. I believe I'm a somewhat intuitive person, and intuition tends to draw conclusions from big pictures ... an excellent route to superstitious behavior. Intuition is good, but it's also good to test your intuition with a little logic.

Anyway, I trust God. If God put me in here on Friday the 13th, then I think that's awesome. It does have meaning for me, but not negative meaning.

I got my first dose of chemo. It was Fludarabine. Tomorrow they will add Cytoxan.

The Fludarabine seemed sort of anticlimactic. This is supposed to be the big whammy, and I got this little tiny bag, less than 1/3 the size of of any previous chemo bags I've gotten.

The fludarabine is the little bag on the right.

I was supposing it was just less diluted. All chemotherapies, as far as I know, are diluted in a solution. On the other hand, there's a rating for how much they're giving me. They're giving me "25mg/m2/day." When I got Cytarabine, that 25 was a 6,000.

Maybe Fludarabine's stronger.

I'm still doing good. I have some uncomfortableness—I can't call it pain—in my esophagus that is probably a sure indication of the beginning of mucositis, which Dr. Jagasia tells me is the major issue to deal with right now. I'm loaded up with lozenges, bland food, dry mouth gel, and such like to deal with mucositis. We'll see how it goes.

My temperature readings today have been 97.6, then 98.6, then 99.1. I don't like seeing that, but maybe it's another product of the steroids.

Speaking of steroids ...

Steroids

I've had to wonder the last few days about whether athletes who take steroids have any idea of their power. I've been shocked by all the things it affects:

• Sleep. I went an entire night without sleep without any apparent tiredness.
• Blood counts. My white blood cell counts more than doubled, and my neutrophils jumped from 660 to 5050 in one day, then to 5880 the next.
• Appetite. They're an incredible appetite booster.
• Blood sugar. My blood sugar counts jump from my normal 105 or so (high, barely in normal range) to around 175 when I'm on steroids.
• Skin. Steroid creams are an excellent cure for rashes.

That's what I know about steroids. I'm sure there's a lot more.

It's really no surprise to me that steroids cause long term problems.

That's it for today!