Cancer Exercise and Rehabilitation Specialist - Fran Whitfield

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A day in the life of chemo.

I filmed all the adventures of a hospital day so you can see! (Warning does contain needles)

7.15am: Start hydrating with peppermint tea, take all meds, vitamins. Pack all essentials, food, water, laptop, conditioner, heat pads.

8.am: Heat pads go onto my hands for the journey to expand my veins and help with cannulating. Down 2 litres of weak squash in the car (water in the morning makes me sick...it's a chemo thing) to hydrate for bloods.

8.30am: Cannular and bloods. On a good day get blood from the cannular, on a bad day like this week took 4 needles in the other arm but eventually got it. Win some lose some!

9.am: Chill, eat, wait for bloods and the okay to go ahead. Usually blog writing, studying.

11.30: Cold cap goes on, pre-meds hooked up. Spelling starts to get really bad!

12pm: Treatment starts. Infusion of Taxol lasts an hour.

1pm: Infusion stops, fluids go on. Cold cap continues for another hour to do it's thang!

2pm: Cold cap switched off, wait to defrost before taking off my head (literally icicles in my hair) Wrap up warm and I'm free!

There's usually a fair amount of delays so I'm actually out of there around 3pm but there's a little insight into the day of chemo!

This is me currently on Paclitaxel chemotherapy. In the days I was having EC (or as I liked to call it the Red Devil) I would have a nurse with me pumping the red liquid into my cannular manually during treatment so it was a little more intense.

I hope you find this insight useful and as always leave a comment or contact me on the contact page if you have any questions and want to reach out! XX