Chemo, Day 1

Given the lack of communication exhibited by my onc's office to date, it will not surprise you to know that they scheduled me to have chemo at the ofc 30 minutes from my house (Red Oak), rather than at the ofc 5 minutes from my house (Cypress), even though I specifically told them last week that I wanted it at the Cypress location.
And we couldn't switch, because the Cypress office didn't have the right drugs. Sigh.
Fine. So we show up at 1:30, and the lady says, "Well, the Cypress office doesn't have chemo on Fridays, so you could have chemo there on Thursdays but then you'd have to come here on Fridays for your Neulasta shot." (Neulasta helps build up your white blood cells, so you're not as susceptible to infection, and it has to be administered the day after chemo to be most effective.)
So I said, "Well, can we just change the chemo to Wednesdays, and then the Neulasta shot on Thursdays?"
And her eyes get all big, and she says, "Well, we'd have to talk to the DOCTOR for that." (Like it was as big as talking to the Pope about eating bacon on Fridays or something.)
Fine, git 'er done. Of course, the DOCTOR was at the Cypress office, where I should have been.
So then, they take some blood, and we go into the chemo place and get settled in.
It was a bit anticlimatic, to tell u the truth. There were two nurses there, whom I shall designate as Grumpy Nurse and Funny Nurse. GN is the one who held the chemo class on Tuesday, and I think I offended her by contradicting her on some stuff. She said stuff like, don't take your antiemetic till you start throwing up, which every cancer patient I have ever talked to said Take It Round The Clock. She'd also said my cancer was Stage 1, and it's not. It was over 2 cm, so it's stage 2.
Anyway, so I've got my blanket, my book, a magazine, a CD player and some CDs, a cooler with ice and grape juice and popcicles and a 3 liter bottle of water. I am SET. I take 3 Tylenol to guard against headache from the Cytoxan, and a stool softener and a laxative to guard against things clogging up later, which chemo tends to do.
They start off with an anti-nausea drip, and then when that's done, they do the Taxotere, which can cause permanent nerve damage to your hands and feet, so, following the advice I'd gotten from other BC patients, I put my hands in the ice in the cooler and kept them cold the whole time.
And I am drinking. Drink, drink, drinking. Drinking grape juice to guard against mouth sores, drinking water, eating popcicles. And going potty. Chemo is hard on your liver and kidneys so you have to flush it out of yr system, baby.
Adriamycin, the second chemical, is red, so I had the experience of peeing red a bit later. Weird. I peed blue after the radioactive dye with the sentinal node biopsy, so this just adds another color.
We got done around 4ish.
and i feel meh. Not bad, but not good, either.
sorry this isn't funny.
everybody, repeat after me "CHEMO SUCKS!"