Ovareactions

Before I had cancer, I didn’t know anything about chemotherapy. Why would I? I’d had no reason to. I’d been fortunate enough to not have anyone close to me go through it. I had no idea how many different kinds of drugs and combinations existed. And I had no idea just how dangerous it could be.

My prescribed cocktail of drugs was BEP – bleomycin, etoposide and cisplatin (platinum). BEP is used to treat testicular cancer and germ cell tumours. “Ooh, this is one of the worst ones,” one nurse kindly said to me, midway through treatment.

BEP is given intravenously, with each cycle lasting 21 days. I had three cycles of the ‘five-day BEP’ treatment course, which consisted of:

• Day 1 – Cisplatin, etoposide and bleomycin
• Days 2 to 5 – Cisplatin and etoposide
• Day 8 – Bleomycin
• Day 15 – Bleomycin

At the end of the 21 days, the next cycle begins. It’s an intensive course with hardly any rest time between sessions. Those first 5 days in particular are a real struggle. The effects of chemo are accumulative, meaning you feel progressively worse throughout the treatment course.

I talked about some of the potential side effects BEP causes in my last post here. Each drug had its individual evils. Bleomycin can cause flu-like symptoms. It can also damage the lungs. If I ever need to have a general anaesthetic or oxygen therapy in the future, I’ll need to let the doctor know I’ve had bleomycin in the past. My favourite piece of official advice was that I shouldn’t scuba dive for a year after treatment with bleomycin. Cisplatin goes for the kidneys, meaning lots of extra fluids on the drip on chemo days to help protect them. Annoyingly, this meant having to get up every five minutes to pee, which is a real faff when you’re hooked up to a drip. Etoposide is just an all-round bastard, which I quickly discovered I was allergic to (more on that next time.)

I’ll chat more about my personal experience with BEP in my next few posts. If you for some crazy reason fancy a deep dive into BEP chemotherapy, the Macmillan website is the place to go.