Chemo 3 day.
Day 1 of 3rd chemo, Friday 26th Feb, 2016. No bad reactions this time thank goodness, just a nightmare nurse. I think I got stuck in the middle of a lazy trainee nurse (57yrs old mind you) who likes to play the confused card and get other nurses to step in and save her for just about everything. Today they purposely for the most part ignored her. Thanks for nothing!
The Doctor came over early as I sat down, never spoke to me, spoke to a nurse, not the one they stuck me with and that nurse smacked the Dr lady’s bottom for being cheeky! I cannot believe she didn’t lay charges, it was most disrespectful. Luckily it was one of the hardest working nurses there and I think she partly attended every single patient all day poor thing.
My appointment was 11.15 and I didn’t get the canula needle in until 12.30. My useless nurse decided the best spot was in the wrist joint. Remember the cardinal rule of chemo; never use a vein in a joint? I reminded her but she didn’t seem to want to listen.
Then she had the hide to ask me could she use my lymphodema arm for the canula and chemo. Obviously the bright pink band on my wrist saying this arm NO blood pressure NO needles didn’t intimidate her enough and she was asking me could she have permission to use it? Hell no! So she stuck to the wrist joint, but fortunately she missed the vein, then she played I need help card and got the poor hardworking nurse to do it as the head nurse was purely ignoring her today. Why do this to me? The head nurse had no troubles the last two chemo doses and even I knew where the vein was, it was standing out from my arm for goodness sakes but the two lower nurses must have been blind.
The hardworking nurse decided lets use the back of the hand and chose the smallest veins. She missed first go and then twisted it around in there to try and find the vein and missed again. I still 5hours later have to keep the pressure pad on that spot as it still bleeds when I take it off.
Then she decided further up near my middle finger knuckle was good and then twisted it off to over my ring finger toward the little finger and it went in with only 1cm left till it would have emerged out of the side of my hand. So that 1cm room for all that chemo liquid you can imagine it hurt like a bitch all day.
Dopey nurse couldn’t calculate (so she said) what rate to set the chemo stuff in and called the hard working nurse to figure it out for her. I mean ffs this is dangerous hazardous poison and this chick is practically doing it unsupervised. I was terrified.
After three lots of premeds (Promethazine, Hydrocortisone, and Granisetron) to combat reactions to the chemo drugs done in order in proper time rates, the docetaxel chemo got fast forwarded to an hour instead of 2, and then she was impatient with the half hour saline flush before the next lot of chemo so she fast forwarded it to 20 mins.
Trouble is when that finished she didn’t turn the rate down and the Cyclophosphamide chemo got started on the fast forward rate. I was talking to an orderly when she did it and it hurt so much I went F**k Me! She said oh is that hurting, while she realised her mistake of not resetting the dose rate after the saline and repeatedly pushed the button down. Muttered something about oh on a pause and restart it often forms a clot at the start. Bull! The fastest rate was 1hour 15mins the head nurse could bump it up the last two chemo sittings did but this one did it in half an hour! You can imagine how much it was hurting going thru that 1cm of space in the side of my hand. She went off for lunch and left the office girl to keep an eye on things. I have no idea if there had been a reaction to the chemo what she would have done. Fortunately the hard working nurse came back after a few minutes so I could breathe easier then. I had told Klutz nurse I was ok with the second chemo drug as a rule, I just had a bad reaction last time to the first drug. She was surprised and said,Did you have a reaction last time? Didn’t she even READ my file?
All my little blood blisters on my arm were black when I got out and my hand even after the needle was out and bleeding under the pad ached so bad I was nearly in tears. I thought about asking for a couple of Panadol but Les showed up to pick me up and once out in the heat it thawed out a bit and my swollen arm full of chemo drugs went off into my body. Please! Never let me have that nurse again!
I had been up most all night worrying about this chemo day and only got 3hours of sleep. Maybe I should have just stayed up all night and fallen asleep in the chemo chair and asked for some heavy duty painkillers to combat the klutz nurse? Nah, I would have ended up with my axillary node cleared arm dosed full of chemo. Grrrrr!
Enough complaining do you like my new favourite shirt? Colour matched to the chemo chairs lol.
