What is predictable for Day 1?
All things nerves:
The increased pain with First Bite, but dammit I still forget until I take that first bite.
Prickly nerves. I have a damaged nerve from a botched wisdom tooth surgery in 1997! So the first nerves to get tingly are on my left side of my chin.
I’m assuming there are nerves in your nose, bc the next quickest pain site is the inside of my nostrils as soon as I step outside from the infusion center.
Fingertips come next. They begin to tingle and they get spikey when I touch the metal doorknob or the metal faucet or don’t get the temperature right when washing my hands before I test it.
For 2 cycles it was the legs as the first thing bc it was difficult for me to walk out of the center, but this time it felt odd but nowhere near the concentration level to walk as before. However it increased when I got home, still not as bad as before, but bending down to clean something disturbs my balance. So that’s off the table for a few days.
Not nerve related?
Teary eyes happens next. That’s not from sadness, just from my eyes feeling like they need to add water.
Breakthrough nausea. Last cycle I asked for extra nausea meds at my appt. This time I verified that I could just take a zofran later, and she said yes. She offered an IV med boost but I declined. I probably should have taken her up on it. I spent 4hrs trying to get comfortable positionally, when I finally realized I should just take the zofran. Last week the breakthrough nausea lingered for a few days. We’ll see what happens this week.
In the category of predictable and incredibly annoying:
Toilet time. Getting myself to the bathroom takes a lot of pep talk to myself. The toileting part is uneventful. But then I have to stand back up, turn around and wipe the seat down with bleach, close the lid, and flush the toilet twice. I must do this with nerve pain and cold sensitivity to the toilet seat and the flusher, and while connected to a pump to manage moving to a safe spot for each stage of the ritual. Days 1-3 are the worst for that part bc of the pump. The ritual must continue through Day 5, but it’s slightly less complicated without the pump.
I guess it’s not hard to understand that by Day 3 I feel incredibly overstimulated and count down the minutes to going to the infusion center to be disconnected from the pump. It’s usually in the 1-2pm hour. So let the countdown begin.
Onward.
Oh wait, the fairly obvious predictable side effect for Day 1: insomnia. Going on waking hour 22. I’ll catch up though.