Some of the medication David took over the last year

I recall David used to say that the medications were sometimes worse than the disease. It seemed that for every medicine he had for the disease, he had another prescription to combat the side effect for the medication.

There was a medication that caused drowsiness so he had another one to prevent the drowsiness. Another medication caused diarrhea, so another one was prescribed to combat the diarrhea and that caused constipation then he had to take another medication to relief the constipation. This was a vicious cycle, there never seemed to be a right balance.

I was frequently at the pharmacy picking up medications.  I recall going there one Saturday afternoon, at the technician did not even bother asking for name or date of birth. She knew exactly who I was and rang up the prescription. I thanked her, for her it was a reflection of her efficiency and for me it was saddening because I was now a regular at the local pharmacy, a reflection of David’s state of health.

I read the drug information for many of David’s drug in order to know what to anticipate especially regarding the side effects. For the oncology drugs, my curiosity led me to review effectiveness of these drugs.  What was saddening is that many of the drugs showed very limited survival benefits as little as 2 to 10 months.  For me there was nothing encouraging about this, after all we were looking for a cure, not a few extra months. Since a cure was not to be found, I can now say that if the drugs contributed to any extra days, I am grateful for this. While the end stages were very hard, I valued every single day David was alive.

This is one of several posts that details our experience with bladder cancer. A concise summary of the overall experience can be found in the blog post titled “breaking the silence”.