Like I mentioned at the onset of this journey, I would not be publishing on a daily basis, more at a milestone interval.

I had a pretty nice time off for a Thanksgiving but this Monday was the beginning of the next, or real stage of treatment. Over that time, I could not spend too much time visiting but more time resting and not on someone’s schedule. At 04:30am on Monday the alarm went off to get ready for the trek to Atlantic General to be the first into the OR to get a port installed sub-cutaneously for blood draws, chemo and much more. The jitters were the hardest as the nurses, anesthesia MD, surgeon and recovery team made it a breeze.

Yesterday was, what I guess a nerd like me would call “Day One”. I arrived at the John H “Jack” Burbage Regional Cancer Center for my first day of treatment at 09:30am. The room is very open and kind of 1/2 moon shaped and each “room” is divided by a curtain, with a nurses station in he center. The room is very open with large windows so it’s very airy and nice. Each treatment day is administered by an “infusion nurse”, which I’d assume is an experienced RN that was looking for change into administering life-saving meds to Cancer patients.

My nurse was Amy and she spent the entire day doing one thing, making me comfortable. The bed, lounger thing sucked, which was expected, but she had little control over that. She started with drawing blood from my port, which was awesome and 100% painless. Next was literally an entire round of anti-nausea drugs via IV. Like I said, from never had anyone close to me or my family going through chemo, I was unaware that one of the biggest side effect from chemo days was nausea. From what I could feel yesterday, anti-nausea has been a huge priority of the concert treatment world as I had none and still do not, almost 20 hours later.

I was discharged around 4:00pm and slept very well night one. I am tethered to an expensive, portable pump that is slowly administering 2 drugs into me for about 32 hours. I return to cancer center tomorrow and in a 5 minute procedure, have it removed until the next procedure on December 15th. So , hopefully I have about 2 weeks for this chemo to attack my shit and make me better. This whole thing started about 6 weeks ago and this is the first single bit of defense we’ve thrown at this fucking disease. Cross fingers and love you all.