Yesterday was long treatment day at NIH. We arrived a little before 8am and the day started. Once they know mum has arrived they prepare the Morab 9 (the antibodies). They don't want to prepare it unless she has arrived because once it's made it has to be used. So while she waits for the Morab 9 to be prepared, they warm up her veins and get the IV line prepared.
The Morab takes a few hours to be delivered intravenously, but it's not painful and mum usually orders some breakfast. During yesterday's Morab treatment she was visited by Dr. Lu a few times as well as Barbara (pic below) to make sure things are going well. Barbara is a research nurse at NIH and she provides us with all the cycle and treatment schedules, helps us set up appointments and pretty much answers any questions we have. Everyone at NIH has been great, but Barbara is pretty special.
After the Morab 9 they change mum over to liquids for a couple hours then they give her two different chemo treatments (Cisplatin and Alimta, I think.) Each of these take a couple hours. Again, no pain during the delivery, but at this point the day is getting long and being in one place for that long has got to stink. After the second dose of chemo they her give lots of liquids again and that takes another couple of hours.
All in all it's a 12 hour day. On this treatment day she is one of the first to arrive and pretty much the last one to leave. Her strength and patience amazes me.
I wanted to share a couple reasons why I'm writing this post, which definitely strays from knitting and vegan cooking, though is has a lot to do with my life...
1) so my family and friends have a sense of what's going on because I know they're thinking about her and sending good thoughts.
2) because when we first learned that mum had mesothelioma and I was searching the internet for any information and the only thing I could find were websites and blogs developed by lawyers. Weeding through all that junk to find what is useful was difficult. I'm hoping these posts will find their way to the top.
