Scarred for life

We may have found the reason my right hand wasn’t working properly for a while last week.  (For a couple of days there, I could not write or make the fingers on my right hand behave.  It was very strange.)  Well, it turns out that during my last IV chemotherapy treatment—which was two weeks ago now—some of the nasty chemo drug Taxotere leaked from my vein and into the surrounding tissue.

                I learned this today when I took myself back to my oncologist with a really ugly burn-like lesion on my hand.  The lesion only appeared Monday.  I thought it was a mosquito bite, at first.  Then, as it got bigger and uglier, and pretty painful, I started thinking it might be a spider bite.  But when I put two and two together, and realized this was the spot where the IV line had been inserted, I got scared and went back to the doctor.

                The oncology nurse could tell from the color of the burn which drug had leaked during the IV.  The good news, she said, is that it wasn’t the adriamycin.  If that had leaked, we might be discussing reconstructive surgery right now.

                We do have to try to figure out how to keep this from happening again during my last four chemo treatments.  Some people’s veins are more likely to leak, and I am now told I am one of them.  Usually, they would now do surgery to install a “port” for future drugs, in my chest.  But, because of the type of surgery I’ll be having in July, they don’t want to install a port in my chest.  So we may try to have to find veins higher up in the arms or something.  For me, all this has just upped the stress ante considerably.

                My nurse said that since it was “only” the Taxotere that leaked this time, there’s not much to be done about my hand.  She said the scar will darken from red to brown, but it will never go away. This actually bums me out.  I used to have beautiful hands. Well, hell, I used to have nice hair and fine boobs, and long eyelashes, too.  That’s pretty much all my favorite body parts trashed, fairly systematically.  Yes, I’m whining now.  I feel like whining today.