Halfway Done with Chemo!

Home Sweet Home

We left the hospital on Tuesday evening about 5:30 to return home.  This marked the completion of the third round of chemo, the halfway mark!  Not that I was counting:

Though I am technically still in the midst of what I call Round Three, it feels great to be able to say that I'm halfway done with the chemo treatments.  Riding home Tuesday I cried - I think it was both tears of joy to have reached such a milestone and tears of sadness to have to do everything I've already accomplished all over again.  As the "halfway tears" have continued to burble up since then, I've decided they're mostly happy.  I've survived three treatments already so I can certainly do it again.  And I can imagine the last treatment now.  After the first and after the second, everything still felt like such a slog, like the end was not in sight.  Through those early rounds I've looked every day at a gift from friends, a pillow that says one day at a time, and I have used that mantra to remain focused on the moment at hand.  

Now I feel like I can appreciate each individual day as part of a larger collection of weeks and it seems much more like a reality now that there is an end to those weeks ahead.  Somehow getting to the halfway mark has allowed my future to open up a little bit and that's wonderful.

A Social Commentary

(let me scoot my soap box a little closer so I can climb up on it...)

What's become abundantly clear from our experience thus far is that the health care situation in this country is indeed a crisis for many families.  We are so fortunate to have jobs with benefits and a health insurance plan through my work that covers the vast majority of costs associated with my treatment.  Illustrating this truth for us, we've just received a bill for my very first round of chemo and the cost was $115,000.  For the first one.  We, of course, paid nothing near that - it cost us a $250 co-pay for a 5-day hospital stay (and perhaps we'll get additional bills but so far our share being .2% of the overall cost is remarkable).  

Now add up that I'm doing 6 of these treatments - $690,000.  And I'll have additional tests along the way...let's just round up to one million.  A family without health insurance or without good health insurance would have easily been wiped out financially already and have no access to continued care.  The fact that we as a community of citizens in this country allow that to be our reality is shameful.  And I don't know how to help move the needle on this issue - how simple it could be for those of us with means in this country to do very, very little to take care of the many without means and yet we put people in power who actually believe trickle down economics is a thing (even though they clearly lived through the 1980s and have eyeballs and saw nothing 'trickle down').  

And I am so worried about the many citizens who rely on health insurance through the Affordable Care Act who probably don't even realize that it's going to be slipping out from under them as their premiums increase as a result of the recent tax bill eliminating the insurance mandate (like hiding peas in their mashed potatoes).  It's exactly that population that doesn't have the luxury or the wherewithal to pester their representatives about the nuances of legislation coming out of Washington and I'm afraid they will only realize that their country has abandoned them on this issue when it's too late.  Slowly diminishing the safety net of health care for our most vulnerable citizens is anathema to everything this country should stand for in my (not-so) humble opinion and it distresses me greatly.  Going through treatment for a serious health condition is difficult enough; not having a system, a country to protect you from said health condition ruining the rest of your life  - finances, home, job - is unthinkable.

(okay, I'm done.)

The Neutral Zone

One thing we've realized about our rounds is that they are a little more nuanced than just bad (chemo), ugly (low period), good (upswing).  The phase we're in now for a few days is sort of a neutral zone, a halfway point of another sort - I'm all about halfway today!  I still have chemo in my system but it's dissipating and so I start to feel a little relief from that phase and I haven't started feeling the biggest effects of the low period but they're starting to creep up.  As a result I have both good and low moments for several days.  I've started back up with the shots as of last night and will start back up with the blood draws tomorrow morning so...here we go again.

I'll check in early next week with an update.  'Til then, happy neutral.