Taking drugs is a full time job

It almost feels like I never left. After a week at UC Health, and a glorious ten days at home, I'm back at the VA for take three of chemo. I'm at the point where I feel almost recovered from the last two rounds. I can walk at a fairly normal pace, I can climb stairs without feeling (abnormally) out of breath, and my guts aren't constantly in a twist. I even had a beer with coworkers on Friday. It was really nice to see everyone, and I was pretty much my old self. So it seems a shame to put more poison in my body and fall back into the sick zone. I know in about a week I'll be feeling pretty shitty, so I don't know what kind of Halloween costume I'll be able to pull off. Any suggestions?

This round of chemo is called GCLAM: three days of Mitoxantrone, and five days of Cytarabine and Cladribine. I also get shots of Filgrastim to stimulate my bone marrow to produce more white blood cells. Hopefully this will help lessen the blow of the other drugs, my cell counts won't plummet as fast or as far, and I won't have as much neutropenic fever. At least I can hope.

Every chemo regimen I've been on has been different. This one involves eight hours a day attached to my IV pole. It also involves a really blue drug (Mitoxantrone) that turns my pee green. I was told this would happen, but I didn't think it would happen so fast or be so obvious. I also read that the whites of my eyes could turn blue, but that has not happened yet.

This is the drug going into my body on day one.

And this is the result. I'm only including the picture because Megan specifically requested it.

I'd like to think I'm more prepared for this hospital stay. I stocked up on food from Trader Joe's, and Chris brought me plenty of granola on short notice to supplement my breakfasts. Which is great because eggs here smell just as bad as I remember. I wasn't sure what to do about decorating my room, and I was tempted to just leave it as-is to avoid the work of tearing it down when I leave, but my brother David has been in town and has made it too easy to redecorate my room from scratch.

Here's me and David at the park, looking serious thinking about hospital room decorating.

 David likes to do stretching exercises before decorating hospital rooms.

 David got a massive butterfly from the Butterfly Pavilion, and giant flowers from Michael's.

 Then I showed David how to make tissue paper flowers. He was immediately much better at it than I was. Elizabeth provided the wall decals.

 Do you see the bird?

 I'm hoping this hospital stay will go by quickly, that I won't get another blood infection, that I won't get diarrhea and hemorrhoids, that my skin won't flake off for weeks. I'm hoping I'll be in remission when it's over, and I'll have a stem cell donor lined up, and a trip to Seattle won't feel like a far off reality anymore. But between now and all of that, I'm going to settle in for day three of GCLAM and hope I can keep myself entertained for the next eight hours.