Chemotherapy is designed to rid you of cancer, but in order to do that, it makes you really sick in the meantime. It's most likely due to what I call "alphabetosis", the side effect associated with every letter of the alphabet being used to spell the names of the chemicals and drugs they use on you. For example, in my first chemo, they gave me daunorubicin, etoposide and citarabine, and in my second chemo they gave me citarabine again and fludarabine. With my last chemo, I started nine days before the transplant. The three chemotherapy drugs used were Busulphan, Melphalan and Fludarabine. So I don't feel sick (ha ha) they give me dexamethazone, maxalon, lorazopam and ondansetron, whilst all the time infusing cyclosporin as an anti rejection drug and aciclovir as an anti viral. I have to have antibiotics all the time as well, so they give me ambersome, timentin, gentimicin, teicoplanin, and if necessary voraconizole and vancomicin. Most of these I'm having all the time, and on day one, three, six and eleven after transplant they give me methotrexate, another chemo, and then folinic acid to reverse it's side effects. Since the antiemetics (drugs to stop you feeling sick) they were giving me were making me feel sick, they stopped them (maxalon and lorazapam) and changed me onto chlropromazine, otherwise known as largactile. Since my appetite has deserted me, I'm having TPN (total perental nutrition) including lipids infused intravenously, as well as my nasogastric feeds at only 10 mls per hour. Whilst all this is going on I'm having supplementary potassium and magnesium, and in case it all gets too much, they give me a background 5 ml per hour morphine, which I can give myself more of if I need it. All these things have combined to make me feel awful. In fact, I'd be happy if I only felt awful, it's actually worse than that. There wont be much I can't spell when I get out of here, and even if I did spell any of these wrong, who's going to know?
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