Port Put In

I was a Johns Hopkins for 6 hours today and had a port put in to ease drug administration and blood taking. My veins are fine, but I will be receiving one drug every week for a year (intravenously) so they want to make sure my veins do not collapse. The made an incision in my neck and inserted a catheter down through the vein into my upper chest were where the port was placed under the skin. This was done under twilight anesthesia (I remember nothing). This port has a rubber top that can be punctured to directly reach my venous blood flow. I have been given a prescription for a Lidocaine cream to rub on the site 30 minutes beforehand to numb any needle sticks. I can even use my port for blood tests, which is a blessing as I have had my veins pricked at least 5 times since Friday. I will use my port tomorrow when I receive my first 5-hour chemo treatment of Adriamycin and Cytoxan (AC). These drugs will compose my first four treatments. My last four treatments will be Taxol, with Hercpetin for two of the four treatments. All total I will have 8 chemo treatments spread out over 16 weeks if I do dose densing (every two weeks) or 8 treatments every three weeks for 24 weeks. for regular chemo. The doctor have given me the choice and I want dose dense chemo if my body can tolerate it. This way I can whack at the chemo as hard as possible.

In case any of you are star gazing tonight, you may see me glowing from all the radioactive stuff they injected in me these last few days. Two of my medical tests (bone and heart scan) used radioactive taggers. Still no word on my bone-scan test done yesterday to see if the cancer has spread there. Hopefully, tomorrow I will have an answer on that one.

UPDATE: The doctor called and my bone scan is clear so no cancer there either. Now she said I should be ready for the 'fight'.