Chemo

Hello Smartgran

I am sorry to see that you have had diagnoses of both breast cancer and primary lung cancer. 

When having a new treatment it is perfectly natural to feel nervous. My chemo was last summer and I was really worried about it before it started. When you have the consents meeting (where the consultant talks to you about the treatment) it is really hard as they have to tell you all the potential issues and side effects to make sure you understand and can give informed consent. I had 2 chemo drugs and one of them was in the same group as Docetaxel. When the consultant told me about the effects I was scared stiff.

However in practice, although I did have a few of the side effects, I did not have any where near all of them. When I did have side effects I told my team and they were able to give support and medication to help control them. At one stage the dose of one of the chemo drugs was lowered to enable me to complete it.

You will be very well monitored through the treatment and they normally give you a diary where you can write down any side effects each day. You can then talk this through with your oncologist at each review. I found it helpful to do this as otherwise you can just forget. I found also that it helped as my experiences with each cycle tended to follow a similar pattern. I felt most poorly for the first couple of days and then slowly felt better. I found the days in hospital were actually helpful in that they gave me a chance to talk things through with my nurses and I also met people going through similar treatments. 

We do have a forum on here that I had support from during my chemo and will post a link in case it is somewhere you want to have a look at. There will be other people on there on docetaxel  and it may be helpful to have a look at their experiences.

(+) Chemotherapy forum - Macmillan Online Community

I hope this helps a bit. I hope that your PICC line insertion goes well and please do let us know if there is anything else you need.

Jane