Preparing for Chemotherapy

This next few days are taken up with getting ready to get the most out of the chemotherapy treatment which starts on Wednesday. Four main themes to the preparation are:

1 Boosting the immune system through good diet. The diet is basically vegan, no meat and milk lots of vegatables and fruit which reduces the toxic load on the body getting it in good shape to clear out the chemotherapy chemicals once they have done their job, I do allow myself one cup of coffee in the morning and the very occasional bit of cheese but other than that I have managed quite well, no wine or beer sadly for the duration now.

2 Specific supplements to help repair damage and manage side effects, I have adopted the well tried Bristol regium of antioxidants (vit C, E, B, Q10, selenium and zinc) and will use Essaic tea and slippery elm to manage the digestive complications which are expected. Anti nausia medication and sea bands will be deployed against the sickness.

2 Mental preparation, there are a lot of studies now that show a linkage between emotional orientation and success of chemotherapy. These have advanced to the level of understanding that dopamine generated by the brain can be shown to stimulate the level and activity of the immune system. Hence I am getting into exercises three times a day to focus and relax myself, it has the good side effect of reducing the fear of the treatment. Played at low volume repeat on my bedside CD the relaxation music has proved effective at minimising the amount of time spent awake in the middle of the night without disturbing Lee. I downloaded all these onto my Ipod to take to the hospital on Wednesday.

3 Light exercise, there seems to be a balance here where light exercise such as Tai Chi seems to be the most effective after treatment so I will sign up for some of the courses to brush up my technique as I am about 10 years out of practice. For now gentle jogging around the Medows park near my house once or twice a day is keeping up a reasonable level of fitness.

Hopefully all of these taken together will enable me to minimise the down time as a result of the chemotherapy treatment and more critically keep my white blood cell counts up during the treatments as if they drop too low then this can postpone or delay the next lot of chemotherapy.

Emotionally I am in good shape and the childeren are coping very well asking all sorts of questions about the chemotherapy, how the kidney and liver work to clean the blood etc on the way home from school today. Lee and I are heading out for a nice meal tonight to take advantage of my tastebuds still working properly for the last time in a few months, I am still hoping that she will take part in the webblog, we will see if she feels like it over the next weeks. Lee's friend Liz took her out for a few glasses of chardonny last night which was just the therapy needed for the moment.

Cheers

Gerry