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The Gross Aspects of Cancer and Chemo

They are not for the faint-hearted

Shefali O'Hara
2 min readNov 3, 2023
Photo by Timothy Hales Bennett on Unsplash

This may gross you out but… here goes.

I was given Cisplatin this round of chemo on the first day of the cycle.

Cisplatin is a chemo drug that can cause kidney damage. To help prevent this, they hook you up to 2 progressive 1 liter saline IVs while you receive the treatment and ask for you to pee into a cup when you go to the bathroom and then let the nurse know the number of ounces you produced.

Yes, this is gross, apologies. However, while I didn’t find the process particularly great, at the same time, it fed my number addiction. I still remember the numbers, 10 days later, which is a miracle given my chemo brain.

So, the numbers were 9, 11, 15, and 21 ounces. I remember my nurse telling me these were very good, and thinking — wow, only one of them is a prime number. I wonder if that signifies anything? When I related the story to a friend he asked what would happen if I’d peed the sequence of pi.

Elsewhere, I’ve written about creating a spreadsheet to record other numbers like my daily O2 measurements:

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Shefali O'Hara
Shefali O'Hara

Written by Shefali O'Hara

Cancer survivor, Christian, writer, engineer. BSEE from MIT, MSEE, and MA in history. Love nature, animals, books, art, and interesting discussions.

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