To understand or to see for once how a chemo therapy works can be very informative if you don't know anything about it. Unfortunately my mother is suffering from cancer. But that made us to make, for you, a report to take a look at a real chemo therapy proces. Every picture is described with a small text. I hope you'll learn something of it.

 
  This is the entrance to the hospital in Maastricht.
  This is the hospital department for cancer patients, oncology.
 

 

 

On this picture it’s shown that the chemo liquids arrive
            

 

 
  A nurse takes the pockets out of the cabinet
  Now the nurses prepare the pockets with the liquid. So they can be conected to a drip.
  The nurses look for a proper vein on the arm of the patient, for a good connection with the drip
 

Once a proper vein has been found, This is the needle which is stabbed
into a vein, so the chemo liquid can flow trough the rest of the patiets body via the blood.

  The needle has been stabbed into the arm
  The valve of the drip is conected with the needle tube.
  The tubes of the drip are connected to valve on the needle.
 

The nurse connects and turns open the pockets with chemo. Now the chemo can flow via the tubes and the needle into the vein of the patient.

  Here the differemt chemo liquids are shown. In this cancer treatment the liquids T, A and C are applied. The T is Taxotere which is takes from a yew tree. The A comes from Adriamycine, that's the pink liquid which causes hair loss. It destroys all kinds of cells, but also fast growing cells. That causes the hair loss, some patients even lose some teeth.
The C is Cyclofosfamide. Typical for this chemo is that the marrow doesn't produce any blood-corpuscle  anymore. Therefore the patient needs a Neulasta injection, which has to be injected 24 hours after the chemo therapy.
  This is an element of the drip, it looks after the speed of the flow of the chemo liquids. It depends on the condition of the patients vein how fast a liquid can be brought into the body.
  The chemo can start.
  The pockets are empty so the chemo is finished by now.
 

 

Once the chemo is inside the body, the patient can return home. In this case, my mother got twenty-four hours after the chemo a special injection. It was delivered at our home by the hospital. The injection was called: a Neulasta injection. It is to produce some blood-corpuscles because a certain liquid disturbs your blood-corpuscle system in the marrow (see pic. 11).

Now tree weeks of the chemo process can start. The first week is, normally, the heaviest week. The third week is a kind of resting week. Most of the chemo is “used” by then.

By the experiences of my mother I know that the chemo felt like if your burning lightly from the inside. Sometimes, she said, it felt like her body wasn’t yours.

In total my mother had 6 chemotherapies, so lasted 6x3=18 weeks.

After all this she got operated. Both her breasts were removed and stomach tissue was placed under the breast skin. Which is kind of a new technology. The skin of the breasts is left undamaged and stomach tissue is placed underneath it. To make the tissue “confident” on its place veins had to be connected. This is checked every hour. And now it has been 3 days ago that she has been operated. So this was my report about my mother. About was has happened until now.

 

 

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