Abandon hope all ye who enter here, plus I have a wig

So I went for my chemo teaching session  and IT SUCKED. The only good part was the tour, which featured people doing things like sleeping, chatting, and reading while getting poison poured into their bodies.

Turns out that what I thought would be a helpful explanation of what was going to happen to me on chemo day was more like a "you have been warned" kind of thing, at the end of which, you sign a form saying that you get it, you're agreeing to poison yourself under medical supervision, and you won't sue anybody if it kills you. Ha! See how I did that?

Here is what I found out:

1. Infection is to be avoided at all costs, but live my life as normally as possible
2. My pee will be red for a few days after chemo, but if blood appears in my urine, it will not be difficult to spot and I need to call the doctor right away (not sure which one though)
3. No ibuprofen, no acetaminophen, no NSAIDs of any kind. Nothing that will mask or artificially lower a fever. Back to narcotics if I have any kind of expander-related pain (which I sometimes do, like yesterday after spending an hour on my left side during the echocardiogram, my left foob swelled up and I'm still pretty uncomfortable). Which means if I don't want to be tooling around CoMO high as a kite, I'm either in for the duration or toughing it out. Thankful for my moderately high pain tolerance.
4. No booze. I figured, but still.
5. There is a large handout with the ominous title Chemotherapy and You waiting to be read. And it will probably be waiting for a long time. 
6. Claritin might prevent the bone pain that Neulasta will cause, but you have to take it ahead of time. Ask your oncologist. 
7. Why isn't my Neulasta shot scheduled yet? (I am actually terrified about this. Neulasta boosts your white cell counts and thus your immune system. White blood cells, for those who copied from encyclopedias relied heavily on outside resources to write their biology term papers and thus don't remember what those are, don't live long and the chemo kills them alongside the bad things it's supposed to kill anyway. They die like flies, but also breed like rabbits (if all goes well) under the influence of Neulasta.)
8. Hand sanitizer.
   
   But not the kind with alcohol in it. (or is that shampoo for my new wig? (Image from http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Hand-Sanitizer).
9. But live your life as normally as possible, especially since "you have a little kid, right? I thought I saw that in your notes." Um, yes I do. And he is in a serious nose-picking phase right now. So. 
10. Getting a port put in is minor outpatient surgery. 

This sucker is subcutaenous. They went in through the jugular vein in my neck to put it in, just above my left expander. I heard the whole thing but was too high to care, thank goodness. My sister was disappointed because there is, apparently, a tradition of naming chemo ports that is rendered moot by having them under the skin instead of out where everyone can gawk at them. Image from http://www.angiodynamics.com/products/smart-port-ct.

So that's my overdue report from the Gates of Hell, aka the Ambulatory Infusion Unit, where they ply you with chocolate ice cream, let your parents come with you to chemo, and generally make you as comfortable as possible while administering carefully calibrated amounts of cancer-killing toxins into your system. Side effects may vary. In my case, I started puking about 4 hours after my treatment.

Quite a cliffhanger, huh? More soon. Note I didn't give any details about my wig:

Wigstand decorated by Jamie w/a Sharpie.