Red Flashing Lights and Beeping

The first week of chemotherapy has ended, and it wasn’t as dramatic as I expected. I can tell that there are likely challenges ahead, but the full impact remains to be seen. Still, it didn’t end as smoothly as I hoped. I really hate beeping.

Ending the Week

On Monday, they sat me in a chair all day, slowly filling me with stuff. The nurses said it may go faster on subsequent Mondays, as long as I adapt well. For the first time, it was all in mosy mode. They ended by hooking me to a pump to carry around the rest of the week.

The pump looked like a stylish, black fanny pack with thin tubes coming out to run under my shirt. Each day, I left work about 2:30, after my last class, and returned to the oncology clinic for a refill. The bag held about a half liter of strange, orange fluid. I also had to keep a hazardous material cleanup kit in case the bag leaked.

The hard part about the bag was getting into and out of the car. The bag sat easily in the passenger seat while I drove, but I had to restrap it around my waist every time I got out. Bit of a nuisance, but tolerable.

Finally, on Friday, they removed the pump. What a relief! I still had to sit for a while to get a couple of other medicines pumped in, but that used other pumps.

The last piece was a patch-type device stuck to the back of my arm, just a smaller pump. This little guy was to sit on my arm, held with adhesive, until about six-thirty Saturday night, flashing a little green light until it was done. At that time, it would pump in some medication to help my body build white blood cells. After about an hour, the flashing green light would become a solid light and I could pull the device off. That would be it; the end of this round of chemo.

Being the end of the day on Friday, the nurses gave me the leftover ham sandwiches that they keep around for patients, and sent me on my way.

Revenge of Prednisone

It should have been a good night. Probably would have, if I could have slept. When I got home, I took my evening pills, which included the last dose of prednisone. I hate that stuff.

For me, there are two bad side effects to prednisone. The first is that it gets me really wired up, making it hard for me to sleep. That meant I stayed up all night. It’s not a productive type of staying up, either; it is really hard to focus on anything.

The second side effect is that it increases my blood glucose. I’m on other medications to keep the glucose down, and they suck already. To have another drug undo all of that is a pain in the backside. This really becomes a problem with Jardiance.

Jardiance is a diabetes medication that removes excess blood sugar by encouraging it to go out through your kidneys and bladder. To do that, it has to send out a lot of liquid as well. If you find yourself in such a situation, know where your nearest restroom is located, because you are going to be there a lot.

The prednisone increases the blood sugar, by large amounts. The Jardiance redirects the sugar and any available fluids out through the kidneys. Before too long, dehydration sets in. So now, in addition to everything else out of whack, everything is running dry.

I finally got to sleep about Saturday at six o’clock Saturday morning. I weighed myself beforehand, as a way to check my fluid levels, and read 182.5 pounds. An hour later, I woke with an urgent need. After attending that, I had dropped to 181.0 pounds. That’s about a pound and a half of liquid in an hour.

Yep, dehydration was a definite issue.

Then the Beeping

My morning was somewhat productive, despite the lack of sleep. I kept up my fluid intake to try to get things settled. I figured the worst was past. I planned that by the middle of the evening, the last medical device would be gone and I could take a proper shower without worrying about keeping things dry.

It was around one o’clock in the afternoon when I heard the beeping. It was soft and a bit distant, so I assumed it came from something a neighbor was doing. Then I moved and it got louder.

The little pump on the back of my arm made the noise.

I went to a mirror to take a look. The flashing green light had become a flashing red light. Something was wrong.

The instructions for trouble were to call the doctor’s office. Obviously, the doctor’s office was closed on a Saturday, so I was directed to go to the emergency room. I grabbed all the related paperwork I had for the device and drove back to the hospital.

I made it through the ER processing easily, but with lots of people looking around and asking, “What’s that beeping?” I didn’t have to sit long before someone ushered me back to get things started.

That was probably a good thing. I’m usually a calm person and tend to adapt to things fairly well. The whole chemo experience has pushed the boundaries of my stress handling, using up quite a bit of my reserves. The beeping beasty on my arm pounced on that and really drove my stress levels high. Add the dehydration and the lack of sleep and I was really on the verge of freaking out.

Overall, it ended well. Once all the medical people were all on the same page, the action was simple. They removed the device, with plans to return it to the manufacturer and try to get reimbursed for it (i.e.: not charged). Then, time was close enough to when the device should deliver its medicine, so the nurse could just inject me directly.

All settled, I went home. It was still difficult to sit. My nerves still shook quite a bit. It still could have been partially the sleep and dehydration, but it was a bit rough.

Then There’s Work

One of the questions at work is whether I would be returning to full-time teaching in the spring semester. My academic program, Computer Software Development (CSD) normally has three, full-time instructors and has seen almost no drop in enrollments. Our sister program, Web Technologies (Web) is much smaller, with one instructor. I can teach any of the courses in those programs, having not only the appropriate degrees but also the work history.

However, the plan by the department is to offer me no more than two courses to teach as an adjunct (part-time) instructor. To do this, the department must rearrange the other courses to accommodate:

  • The two full-time CSD instructors will have an overload of six courses each, in addition to their other duties.
  • Some non-core courses will not be offered. For example, students who took 2-D Game Programming in fall will not be offered 3-D Game Programming in spring.
  • The one instructor for Web is also in the Army Reserve and will be going on deployment in February for seven months. The junior CSD instructor will take over the Web duties including being the acting program chair.
  • The junior CSD instructor is still taking the required training program that all community college instructors must take during their probation, so he must devote time to that outside of the overloaded teaching assignment and new program chair duties.

There hasn’t been a clear explanation for all of these changes. Some of the faculty are completely confused by the whole process. So far, there are only rumors, some of which suggest that someone at the vice-president level really does not want me at Kirkwood, but I haven’t been able to find anything about those.

That’s how things seemed to be working out last Friday. It’s possible that I’ve misheard any of these things; I’m not involved in any of the discussions. It’s also possible that the whole plan, if that is the plan, could be tossed out on Monday and replaced with something else.

For the moment, I’ll just figure to be working somewhere else in spring. Basically, the semester ends in the middle of December. I turn in my grades and am then done. As of that time, I can take up whatever work I want. If I start now, I can be pretty sure of a smooth transition. I might even take that last half of December off and start in January instead. There’s lots of possibilities.

Two Weeks

So now, I need to wait two weeks until my next round of chemo. I’ll be watching for the various signs of side effects. I think I may already be seeing some of the dry mouth side effects, but that could also be dehydration and low humidity. There may be a call for gum chewing.

The two weeks will probably pass quickly. I’ll need to keep up my strength and eat well. Lowering stress will also be important, so I may need to slap people as a release. I wonder if I can use chemo-related stress as a defense in court.

If I know I’m not going back to Kirkwood, I can spend my “free” time working on other projects. There are some online courses I’ve been thinking about writing (UML Use Cases, anyone?) and some other things I could be doing.

Then the cycle will begin again.