Okay, so that’s how I am striving to think about the chemotherapy treatment I am lucky enough to be able to take into my body this morning.

But I can’t help niggling over the question of how it ended up chem-o-therapy instead of chem-i-therapy. They’re not chemocals.

Books and healer people have been reminding me that the more I can welcome the chemo, accept it, get behind it, visualize it working for me, the better it will work and/or the better I will tolerate it. I have never felt as some patients do, that chemotherapy is a horrible attack imposed on them from (?) their doctors, and they need to resist it or get it out of their bodies as soon as possible. I wouldn’t agree to a medical treatment of any sort that I felt that way about. Nor have I been drawn to visualizing what’s going on with chemo as little Pac Men traveling the paths of my body chasing and eating up harmful cancer cells–that just hasn’t appealed to me. My massage person suggested I imagine it as light, just light, coming through my port and into my body. Maybe I can work with that word “port”…porthole…hmm, sea port where lots of illegal immigrants come ashore to work hard all over the country but tax the social-services system a lot. 🙂

So you can see my visualization efforts need a little more work. I guess that’s today’s job.

I have already determined that No Work Will Be Done during chemo treatments (even though I’m there for 2 to 3 hours). No catching up on e-mail, no filling out forms, none of that–just relaxing and reading and talking and giving that time over to focusing on me, resting and healing.

I asked the oncologist and my nurse to switch my anti-emetic drugs around this time to see if it can go better for me. So now I will get a new drug today through Wednesday, Emend, that works differently from the anti-emetics that haven’t done much for me. I will get a different anti-emetic along with the chemo (the one I got in 1995) instead of Aloxi, a newer one that might have caused my stomach trouble, and I’m taking Marinol from the beginning instead of Zofran, because the Zofran didn’t seem to have any effect and maybe the Marinol did.

So…we’ll see.