1 Week to the Day...

I'm taking a chemo drug called Erbitux. It is different than traditional chemo. It does not cause nausea or hair loss. But it's main side effect is no walk in the park either: a major rash (which looks very similar to having really bad acne.) It can be very painful and scaring. I guess I didn't pay my time with teenage acne issues...

It's amazing that they can put your symptom occurrence on a timeline and tell you exactly what will occur when. I was told the rash would occur about one week after the first treatment. And sure enough, to the day, I had a breakout.

The timeline for the rash is:
weeks 1-3: acne rash, getting worse week by week (even hour by hour sometimes)
week 4: scabbing
weeks 5+: rash starts to general subside, getting better over time, could take weeks or months

And in keeping with full disclosure, Im showing pictures of my horrible gross rash. This is so embarrassing. These pictures were taken at about 10 days out.

Luckily, I dont have a ton on my face, yet...
its mostly all between my eyebrows and hairline, with a little around my nose.

The majority of it is one my neck and chest, because that is where it is reacting with the radiation treatments.

In this last picture you can also see where my port was put in. The two incisions are much more red than they should be, and they itch terribly. The doctors are concerned that it might be infected, especially after finding out about my arm infection-more details below.) Which is really really bad. They would have to take out the port and put a new one in. Not fun. We will find out over the next couple of days what happens.

We received the culture results back from Urgent Care from the infection in my forearm incision. It's not staph, but much worse, Pseudomonas. A very aggressive bacteria that spreads through your blood system and is very resistant and hard to fight. So instead of my first round of antibiotics of 5 days, with the possibility of 10 days for staph, I'm now looking at 15 days of strong antibiotics (cipro.) Let's just hope my port is not infected also.