First day of drugs

My day began with a nice lay in, till about half eight. I wasn't woken by nurses for blood today and I made the most of the relative peace. At around 10am a nurse poked her head round the door and asked 'are you ready for chemo?', like it was the hairdressers. I'm not used to being asked this, you don't normally get the choice, so I said yes.

I then had 30 minutes of Fludarabine and 4 hours of Campath which I now believe is also a chemo drug. Get this: (taken from the info on campath) 'Campath locks on to a protein called CD52, which is found on the surface of a type of white blood cell called a lymphocyte. This trigger's the body's immune system to attack the cells and destroy them'. It's like a war going on in my body, with drugs created to make me attack myself. The side effects of this are that on the first administration of Campath for about 1-2 hours you go into a bit of a fever state, high temperature, rigurs...I also got a pulsing pain in my spine similar to that I suffered the day before my stem cell harvest. This was all adequately controlled with pain killers and anti-histamines, but these left me rather drowsy and I spent most of this afternoon dozing in bed. I get another 4 days of this but apparently the first day is the worst one.

Tea tonight was a bit of an odd one: veg soup, chicken in breadcrumbs and scrambled egg with a cheese sandwich on the side. Dessert: ice cream and yoghurt. I cleverly decided to put the chicken in the cheese sandwich and with a little lug of ketchup made a slightly more appealing McChicken-on-a-shoestring-style sandwich. Which I had to dip in my soup as it was a bit dry.