Dr. Nathan: Cancer can have a huge impact on your life because although the treatments we have for
cancer work really well, unfortunately, many of them can make you feel really unwell for the
periods of time that you're getting the treatment. Fortunately, we can do a really good job these
days of dealing with side effects of your cancer, so it's not going to be the same, but once the
cancer treatment is done, our goal is to get you back into normal life as soon as possible.
Mariana: I would go to school and almost feel like I wanted to go to sleep. I'm just really really tired and I
was always nauseated. Nausea, that was the worst.
Those medicines ended up causing a lot of side effects in my body. I had typhlitis, which is where my bowels were infected and it
caused me not to eat for 15 days and drink. And I was pretty hard on me because at that time I
was losing 10 pounds from the whole steroids and everything that gave me in the beginning.
So after those 10 pounds, while not having to eat or drink anything that caused even
worse. So after probably like four months, I ended up being way too like underweight then
normal kids, so I had to put a tube in my nose. You don't really sleep well at night and just knowing
that you have that horrible feeling of nausea and yeah. So cancer treatment is pretty hard.
The chemo is pretty tough and especially that for me everything got more complicated every side effect
that they told me I could have, I ended up actually getting.
Archin: I'm actually from an Indian background, so we eat a lot of spicy food. But the thing is when you have sores in rooms you can't really handle
all that. It's an experience. It's not the greatest experience. You feel a bit nauseous and all that,
but it has to be done to try to help you. They're just trying to help you. Because we did radiation
therapy it affected my growth so I take growth hormone for it, but that's pretty much it.
Kafia: Well, I started having hair loss and I lost a lot of weight and that's a really big issue for
me because um the doctors were always trying to bring my weight up.
Amal: The major thing with her was nausea and pain. Most of the time she was on actually a pain pump, the PCA ,to help manage with pain.
And also she was on really high doses of hydromorphone and to help with pain management at home and in
the hospital.
Hasina: Um, well how I dealt with nausea, like they give you that prescription medication and they try to like find the best one.
And the best way that I found really works is to make sure you take it on time. So if we're supposed to take every eight hours, like make sure you take it every eight hours.
Don't wait till you like feel like you're gonna vomit to take it because it doesn't really like
work fast enough. So if you take you on time you find that it works better and you feel less like
you're gonna vomit.
David: It may seem overwhelming and it may seem frustrating sometimes, but there's a reason why you're given a certain treatment plan or a treatment protocol
to deal with your kind of cancer diagnosis.
Dr. Nathan: When we send you home with chemotherapy drugs, you make sure you take it and you take it in the way that it's directed.
But if we send you home with those medications and you don't take them as prescribed, the likelihood that you'll get some side effects that are
quite unpleasant there's a lot higher than if you're compliant with the drugs we prescribed.
Kafia: You're not alone and the side effects of cancer, most of them are temporary, so you might be
feeling bad now, but hopefully when you're done your treatment you'll be feeling much better.