I’m starting to learn the ins and outs of dealing with home life after chemo therapy. It’s slow going but every day I’m learning something new about myself and people are providing me with some really awesome resources.

I first want to touch on how key my Fitbit HR 2 has been to helping me keep track of my steps, water intake, and sleep. Even though I’ve been really tired lately, it’s been important for me to try to at least move around throughout the day. If I stay in bed all day, I run the risk of blood clots which would lead to fever and a lot of bad things.

I’ve got a 48 hour post chemo window where I need to flush all of the medicine out of my system. One of my #1 jobs right now is to drink as much water as humanely possible to get it all out (clear pee is key). My dad also needs to stay hydrated because he’s having multiple night sweats at night and he’s peeing like crazy during the day. We both have fitbits so we started a friendly wager on how much water we can drink throughout the day. Since my taste buds are switching back and forth, I ordered 2 cases of coconut water from Costco so I can keep staying hydrated even when regular bottled water doesn’t taste good. Many of you know how big of a recycling hippie I am. This pains me to do it but I have to keep drinking out of new bottles all the time to reduce the risk of contamination with old bottles. I guess I’m making up for all the times I carried a reusable bottle with me.

I found out the reason I haven’t been sleeping much at all the last week since I started chemo was because the Dexamethazone is a steroid to jump start my immune system. As a result, it’s increased my energy, heart rate, and my metabolism too. I had a shot of it before starting chemo at the hospital in the late afternoon, and at home I’m taking it twice a day in pill form. I’m afraid to sleep. Joanna’s not with me and I either get tired and nauseated, wake up covered in sweat, or wake up in a lot of pain. My Fitbit’s been really helpful in knowing how badly my sleep has been doing. I’ve been taking short 45 min naps a few times a day, whatever I can get.

Whoah…I just started feeling nauseaus, like I felt like my office chair was starting to swallow me up and the laptop was getting higher above my head. Perfect transition to taking meds!

I’ve got a cornucopia of medications that I’m mixing and matching right now:

Prochlorperazin (Anti nausea – every 6 hrs): Take as needed, I’m taking this as I’m getting ready for bed because I tend to get nauseated when I’m tired.
Ondansetron (Anti nausea – every 8 hrs): Take when the Prochlorperazin doesn’t work, usually 45 min after I fall asleep and shoot awake ready to barf.
Tylenol (Low pain – every 6 hrs): Take as needed
Tramadol (Moderate pain – every 4 hrs): Take as needed or mix one tablet with 1 500mg of Tylenol before bed.
Dexamethasone (Steroid): 2 tablets a day until I run out

Ok now that you know the giant mess of pills I have, when to take them, and how often, I needed a way to stay organized while I grabbed pills in the middle of the night when I’m on the verge of puking.

I found an app online called Medisafe. They have a really awesome story as to how they came to be. https://medisafe.com/company

Two brothers experienced what it’s like when a loved one goes off course on his meds…

When Omri and Rotem Shor’s father accidentally took an extra dose of insulin in 2012, putting him in a dire situation, the brothers quickly learned how common their frightful experience was to so many other people. With only 50% of patients correctly following their regimen and non-adherence causing a death every 4 minutes in the U.S. alone, they knew they had to act. From that near-tragedy came Medisafe, the leading app and medication adherence platform helping millions worldwide take their medication on time and as prescribed.

This app has literally been a Godsend. I highly recommend it to everyone and I’ve barely scratched the surface of all its features. What I’m currently using it for is scheduling meds and reminding me to take them and logging when I take the as needed stuff.

My friend Nick said he’s using this app as well and you can add “Medfriends” who will get notifications if you don’t check into the app to take your scheduled medications. Very cool!

I’ve started to figure out the best ways to combat my nausea and that’s my love for salty snacks. This is basically my All-Star lineup on how I’ve been surviving between meals.

Soylent: My mom wanted to force feed me Ensure and Boost to add calories to my diet. The problem is that Ensure and Boost taste like sugary garbage.

When I showed Jean, the nurse practitioner the Soylent that Bob sent me and Joanna brought to the hospital her reaction was “WOW dang, this is good stuff, where did you get it?”

Soylent Ensure Boost
Size 14oz 8oz 8oz
Calories 400 160 240
Sugar 9g 15g 20g
Protein 20g 9g 10g

Pistachios: good nut-rition and nice thing to crunch on if my mouth starts tasting like metal

Beef jerky: I’m going to try to not eat too much processed food but this has been super helpful in the middle of the night for me to chew on and desire water due to the saltiness

Saltine crackers: General queasy aid

Werther’s originals: I’m an old man at heart and love me a hard candy. This helps when I have the metal-y flavor in my mouth.

Trident gum: Joanna knew that I’d be snacking a lot so she got me gum that has xylitol in it because dentist reasons. This also helps with the metal flavor.

Water: it’s water, I drink it

I tried making homemade popcorn with fresh clarified butter yesterday afternoon. While I enjoyed the activity, the smell of the oil and butter just made me gag. The salty snacks definitely help but I need to keep it clean. Chips probably won’t work unfortunately (I LOVE sour cream and cheddar Ruffles).

I REALLY packed on a ton of information in this blog post. I’ll end it with something AMAZING that happened yesterday afternoon that was totally unexpected.

I grew up watching a Japanese anime called Naruto. In it there’s a character called Kakashi Sensei. I posted on the Naruto subreddit as a joke that I’m channeling my inner Kakashi to maybe get some positive votes from people. Oh how I was so wrong….

I didn’t pay any attention to my post until about 6 hours later, my phone started blowing up with notifications.

Within 8 hours of posting, I was ranked #71 most popular post in the entire website. For those who aren’t familiar with the site, as of May 30th 2018, Reddit Is the Third-Most-Popular Destination on the Internet.

Link to the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Naruto/comments/8u36ok/just_finished_round_1_of_chemotherapy_dyed_my/

21 hours later, I’m at 13,170 upvotes from the community,166.1k views, +400 comments, and someone even bought me Reddit Gold!

In the post, I included a link to my blog to provide context on what I’m going through and those numbers are equally insane. Yesterday my blog got over 4,700 hits and today I’m over 4,000! With all the international views, it’s truly Loosing itself abroad!

The trolls have been…troll-y

Genkigarbanzo1 1 point 12 hours ago
Your mom is hot as hell

gporafk -13 points 14 hours ago
u got cancer from anime

lertiveallthetime 1 point This one knocked the winds out of my sails, racism sure is funny right? :/
Your dad and yourself are paying the price for eating dogs from Karma. Also, does your mom love her men long time?

Others were weird but hilarious

TheCrimsonCloak
dude don’t you worry, your young, you have all your life ahead of you, your gonna get trough this !
BUT man … no homo umm ur kinda hot … and your gonna look even cooler with a shaved head
don’t give up the fight bro
cheers

from Evilsj
Holy shit, maybe without the mask you wouldn’t but goddamn you’re a spitting image of Kazuchika Okada (Japanese pro wrestler).

I lost it at this one

mysistersacretin [+1]

You have the power of god, and anime on your side!

But the one on one connections have been amazing. With how rare my cancer is, I’ve already had 3 people reach out to me saying that they have been fighting a germ cell tumor themselves. I’ll feature two of the stories.

From Fingo0r

Hey Andrew,

It is rare and very uncommon. I had it when I was a teen, 16 yo. I had extreme back pains, because the tumor went up from my testicle and fused with part of my back and was pinching some nerves.

After removing my testicle and doing a biopsy, they said it is an extremely rare case for a teenager to have testicular cancer, nonetheless a germ cell tumor.

After 5 rounds of initial chemo and another ct scan, I hod to do a massive surgery to remove the tumor fused with my spine, but everything went well.

Then I did rounds of radiotherapy, 65 of them on my abdomen, pelvis and lungs(since I had another 3 lung nodules).

All in all, it was a good experience :)) I experienced a lot of it and if you ever need support, try reaching out to your local cancer charity. They might be able to put you in contact with other cancer patients or survivors 😉

hope this helps and if you ever have any question feel free to drop me a line 🙂

From thomas_nook
Wow, crazy. I was diagnosed with germ cell in my chest too, a year ago yesterday. Keep up the good fight man and know you’re not alone, everyone is rooting for you.

[For me] it’s still not over. After a semester of school where I got sick a lot but didn’t really think much of it besides that it sucked, I was diagnosed while on vacation in Colorado because the altitude was making me feel completely terrible. I had some chemo for a couple months with a PICC line and then some radiation and I thought I was over, and by that time it was about November. About a month passes by and I feel some weird symptoms and get scanned, and it turns out my tumor markers never went all the way down. When my symptoms got too bad (terrible back pain because of involvement in my spine) we went to the ER at MD Anderson in Houston where I got some more chemo and then high dose chemo with autologous stem cell transplant. My markers still didn’t come all the way down from that and so we’re turning to a trial immunotherapy but in the staging MRI for it, they found a brain tumor so now I have to get what’s called gamma knife to deal with that which is single dose high radiation to the spot (thankfully I’m having no symptoms from that) in two days. 4 weeks from then, I’ll be able to start the immunotherapy which will hopefully control or stop the cancer and also make me more susceptible to further chemo.

I know you probably wanted to hear a happier story but that’s what it is. I’ve been blessed with the support of my family and friends, especially my parents, who work out all the travel and logistics and meds and try to make me comfortable as possible.

I’m sure you’ll fare better than me, my tumor was caught very late and was huge and involved in a lot of places. The chemo is rough and you’ll probably have a lot of nausea coming up but as long as you keep your spirits up and have support around you i know youll make it.

Sorry for the novel, I just didn’t think I’d find anyone with my same diagnosis.

I’ve always seen Reddit as a way of killing time during boring shopping trips with Joanna or a distraction from school but I really felt like I was part of a community today. I am so energized now to keep writing in this blog to provide my newly learned knowledge to those who are suffering from the same or similar cancer and for those who love them too.

Feel free to read the other comments on the reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Naruto/comments/8u36ok/just_finished_round_1_of_chemotherapy_dyed_my/

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