You hear folks say chemotherapy sucks, but until you go through it yourself, you don’t really know how bad it can be. It remains a popular activity only because it’s better than the alternative.
Every week, they used this machine to tap into my spine, extract 5 mg of fluid for analysis, and replace it with 5 mg of methotrexate. There was only a local anesthetic during the procedure and the hardest part was knowing that there was a needle, turned up to eleven, going into my back.
It was afterwards that things got dicey: the nerves in your spine float in a thecal sac filled with spinal fluid that acts as a kind of insulator. Since we were exchanging the fluids, it was easy for the levels to get out of balance and for the nerves to react.
