Better living through chemistry...

Back in the late 60's {that would be 1960s}, "Better Living Through Chemistry" was the montra of a lot of us ol' hippy and psuedo hippy types.
I/we just cruised along popping 'lil orange, blue, white , black or whatever color of pills or capsules into our gullets and swished them down with some Ripple or Annie Green Springs, called it good and wandered around giggling and doing foolish things for hours.
My/our mental states were altered, sometimes significantly and I/we thought nothing of it.

A lot of my previous post and of the time since March 17 (diagnosis) I have spent with a slug of chemicals being introduced into my system. One of my Nurse Practitioners took it upon herself from the very get go of my admission to the hospital told me and reminded me that I was going to experience a lot of side effects from all the meds and the chemo but she referred mainly to the physical side effects.
It wasn't until being into the mental side effects that anyone told me that I would be experiencing some drug induced whackiness...which came true but I can only attribute drug induced whackiness to a small part of the hell that I went through in my previous post.
There are some, no doubt who will want to lay the majority of the blame on my mental status as being drug induced, and they will be right as far as they go but that hindsight and having experienced what I did leads me to know that all the drugs were, besides their intended pharmaceutical purposes, doing was acting like Miracle Gro to the Dark Side "weeds" that were sprouting and temporarily flourishing with a vengeance.
The chemo that I was taking in Fort Collins was more of a "hold at bay" attempt rather than a Myeloma eradication course.
That didn't start until I got down to the hospital in Denver and was hooked up to the pole that held the chemo drugs and other "things" that needed to be introduced into me via a drip system.
I found a morbid curiousness that for the weeks that I was receiving the heavy duty chemo {the one whose job it was to go in and basically come as close as it could to killing me by wiping out most of my white blood cells, platelets along with as many Myeloma cancer cells it could run down} that the nurses who would come in to change out the chemo bags would enter my room and put on disposable haz-mat suits...and I would think, "Haz-mat suits? And this is the stuff that you are putting in me?"

I had a really good check-up with Dr. Lee Monday and I think that both Bonnie and Doug who accompanied  me got the same read that I did that he was almost surprised at the positiveness of my progress!
The week before when Stacey and I went for a check-up he sort of laid out the picture of what the next few month would look like...2-3 trips to UCH (University of Colorado Hospital) per week, trips to FRCS (Front Range Cancer Specialists in Fort Collins) twice a week or so for chemo, etc. ... but we came away with my only having to come down to UCH every other week for a while and non invasive trips to FRCS for chemo either in the form of pills or shots with lab work that my indicate the need for IV fluids if I don't keep myself hydrated.
My "maintenance" treatment will consist of chemo, via the shots or pills for 3 years.

That's what I know now, and I can live with that...better living, or life if you will, through chemistry.