Swanney: Would sir care for a starter? Some garlic bread perhaps?
Renton: No, thank you. I'll proceed directly to the intravenous injection of hard drugs, please.
I couldn't help thinking of this scene from Trainspotting today; it's been a veritable banquet of intravenous drugs, the main courses being - since they still don't know the primary site - a general-purpose double whammy of docetaxel and cisplatin. I can't remember the exact order, but it started with a savoury course of saline solution, then an antihistamine and steroid to protect against allergic reaction to the chemotherapy drugs. Then it was an important vegetable course: the yew-derived docetaxel (I wonder if it was "slivered in the moon's eclipse"). More saline, then a sweet alcoholic vegetable course in the form of the diuretic mannitol, originally obtained from the Flowering Ash tree. Then the second main course - cisplatin - followed by a bit of nutrition: magnesium and potassium to replace all the salts I'd peed out from all this liquid intake (which was augmented by a lot of tea and juice). And finally, a sweet dessert of intravenous glucose. The whole lot took about five hours.
It wasn't as bad as I'd expected. It was chiefly boring, especially with the monotonous Philip Glass soundtrack of minimally-varying alternating notes from the pump, and I got desperately restless toward the end. Despite bringing along plenty of reading, being tied to a drip-feed all day makes you realise how active you usually are. I didn't feel any drug-related ill-effects during the procedure. At present, I'm just about to turn in, and all I feel at this stage is a bit dyspeptic ((most likely from wolfing down my tea) and very tired (less likely to be from the chemotherapy than being awake most of last night worrying about it). I guess the genuine nastiness doesn't kick until the stuff starts kicking around my cell walls and DNA.
- James
