A Father's Brave Battle With Throat Cancer (page 7 of 8)

The First Chemo Session

In late January, my treatment begins at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Nancy Lee, MD, is the radiation oncologist. Without fail, each of the residents and nurses I meet who are in her charge speak about her achievements and talent in the hushed way that I recognize from sports. She is a stud. Although she is slight in stature, her demeanor and focus might just intimidate the cancer out of me.

Matthew Fury, MD, will be my lead oncologist. He is humble, quietly confident, straightforward, and infinitely patient. At one point, I see him come into the clinic to spend extra time with an elderly woman who is confused about the treatment and clearly in discomfort. He doesn't see me, but I see the time he takes with her and realize that I am in the company of someone who has found medicine as his calling.

My first chemo session is an all-day event. I report at about 8 a.m., when the clinic opens. They begin by running saline and fluids into an IV until you need to urinate. That's when they hand you a pitcher with volume markings and tell you to measure your "output." All around me that morning I see men of various ages and sizes, young and old, some with beards, MBAs, truck drivers, prostate cancer here, lung cancer there, shuffling their IVs along, murmuring a discreet number to their assigned nurse. Then every couple of hours the head nurse sweeps in for a report, and all the duty nurses call out to her from across the room with the running urination totals of their patients: "Bachman, 16 milliliters; Hernandez, 22; Reynolds, 12; Wilson, 19 …"

When you've taken in and expelled the right amounts of fluid, the nurses come back with some serious-looking plastic pouches. So serious and toxic that they wear gloves to dispense the stuff and ask you to repeat your name and patient number out loud to them; then they repeat it to each other, one reading off the name on "your" bag to the other. It's an unnerving ritual. I'm reminded of the feeling I had before kickoff in high school football, when you're about to turn downfield at full speed and smash into someone. You know what you're about to do but not sure how it's going to turn out.

For me, the side effects of all this hit the second day, just as I finish the first full week of radiation: dizziness, dehydration, nausea, ringing in the ears, lights in the corner of the eyes, even hallucinations. And I have five more weeks to go.

For the duration of treatment, we move closer to the hospital, into a two-bedroom apartment on a high floor in a new cracker-box tower. I am in one bedroom; Hilary and Ty are in the other. There are two bathrooms, which is the point. I spend a lot of time in there. Blisters line my gums and the inside of my cheeks. I have no saliva, just a preponderance of phlegm and brackish stomach acid. I am awakened as phlegm builds in my throat and halts my breathing. I get up to urinate four, five, six times a night and need to gargle each time to keep my throat clear, so I never seem to sleep more than two hours at a time.

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