When the fourth and last round of EC90 was done, I thought the worst part of chemo was behind me. Technically, that was true. What I didn’t know was that part two would be a completely different experience. Not harder, but longer, quieter, and strange in its own ways.
The plan was Taxol, a different chemotherapy medicine, once a week for 12 weeks. On the same day as my first Taxol I also got my first Phesgo injection, the targeted treatment that would continue long after chemo ended. Phesgo deserves its own chapter, so here I’ll just say it existed and move on.
Every Monday, the same routine
EC90 came every third week, so life had a rhythm: one heavier week, two okay weeks. Taxol flipped that completely. Every single Monday, the same program: get up early, take the metro to the hospital, pull a queue ticket (kølapp) for the blood test (blodprøve), sometimes a short appointment with the doctor or a nurse, then wait to be called into the infusion room. The infusion itself took about an hour, a bit longer than EC90. Then home, and a nap. Not a cozy little nap, the kind of sleep where you disappear for three hours. That nap was non-negotiable, my body simply shut down after every infusion.
About two thirds of the way through, my treatment moved from Ullevål to the brand new Radium hospital. I have to say, as far as places to get chemotherapy go, it’s a very nice one.
The less nice part of weekly chemo: needles, every week, in veins that got more and more tired of the whole project. Some weeks the nurse found a vein on the first try. One week it took four sticks 😞
A different kind of tired
At my first Taxol appointment I told the doctor that EC90 had been surprisingly easy for me, I almost didn’t feel it. He said there is no connection between how bad your side effects are and how well the treatment works. I found that very comforting, so I’m passing it on.
Taxol was, in the dramatic sense, even gentler. No nausea. No strong feeling of medicine sitting in the body, which EC90 definitely had. Food tasted normal, water tasted like water (or maybe slightly sweet, but I could live with that).
But the tiredness was a different kind of tired. Not sick-tired, more like the battery draining fast. I could feel completely fine sitting still, then any activity would empty me, and the need for sleep was huge. And this is the strange thing about chemo fatigue: resting doesn’t really refill the battery either. It’s just there, with or without the sofa.
The small things that added up
Taxol never hit me with one big wave. Instead, small things collected week by week:
- Nosebleeds. Some weeks just a little, a few times properly heavy.
- Dry everything. Dry eyes, dry mouth, dry mucous membranes, and yes, it stings in places you don’t mention at a dinner table (if you know what I mean).
- A loose stomach on and off. Never dramatic, just unreliable.
- Aching joints and a body that felt a bit swollen, like it was holding water.
- Nails turning dark.
- And my face. Towards the end I got a rash, and some days my face was properly red and looked really bad. One day it got so red I took an extra Dexamethasone (a cortisone tablet from my chemo medicine pack), and it calmed down within hours, but I was genuinely scared the pigment changes would be permanent.
Since this is written long after: the face took its time. It stayed inflamed for a good while after treatment, with pimples and generally unbalanced skin, and I honestly don’t know which treatment to blame for what. I ended up going for special facial treatments. It’s fine now, but it was not a quick fix.
None of these things alone was a big deal. That’s what surprised me about Taxol. There was no dramatic low point like the red devil weeks, just a slowly growing list of small complaints, and the question every week: will this one get worse?
Is that neuropathy, or am I imagining it?
Somewhere around the middle of the 12 weeks I started asking myself a strange question: is that tingling in my fingers real, or am I looking for it because the nurses keep asking about it?
Neuropathy (nerve damage in fingers and toes, a known Taxol side effect) is the thing the team watches closely, because it can become permanent. Mine never hurt. It was more like a faint presence, something I could notice if I paid attention, and then doubt a minute later. Is it there all the time? I honestly couldn’t tell, and I remember finding that uncertainty almost more annoying than the feeling itself.
Where it landed: today, almost two years later, I think a tiny bit is still there. It doesn’t bother me, I almost never think about it, but if I ask myself honestly, yes, something is there. I can live with that very well.
Life kept happening around it
Here is something I didn’t expect about a 12-week chemo: from the outside, big parts of that autumn probably looked almost normal.
I was still working a little through most of it, from home, at whatever pace the week allowed (why I worked at all during cancer treatment is a whole post of its own). I sold my old apartment between two rounds. Friends visited, and on the good days we walked all over the city. In the middle of it all I even flew to a work conference abroad. It went fine, mostly. One afternoon I hit the wall completely and was finished by four o’clock, back at the hotel feeling like I had a fever that the thermometer refused to confirm. But I went, I attended, I flew home. Sliten (tired), yes, but I did it.
I’m not telling this to sound tough. It’s more that weekly Taxol, at least for me, left room for pieces of normal life in between, and those pieces mattered more than I can explain.
The scare I didn’t need
One thing from that autumn I’ll mention only briefly. At a routine examination for something completely unrelated, the doctors found something that needed further checking. I won’t go into details, because honestly the details don’t matter. What matters is the weeks of dread while waiting, convinced this was going to be a second cancer. I remember thinking: I can’t handle any more bad luck right now. I simply don’t have the capacity.
It turned out to be fine. But if you’re in treatment and something like this happens to you, I just want you to know the feeling is normal. When you’re already a cancer patient, every other little health finding feels ten times scarier than it would have before.
Finally, some good news on the pictures
Around round 8 I had a control MR, and a mammography the day after. Small funny detail: the mammography hurt much less than the one from the diagnosis time. Maybe the technique, or maybe, just maybe, because the tumor had gotten smaller. I chose to believe the second one.
At round 10 the doctor confirmed it: the tumor was responding. Still visible on the pictures, but clearly smaller than before. After months of taking everyone’s word that the chemo was doing something, this was the first actual proof. It’s hard to describe how much lighter that Monday felt.
The round I never took
And then, the ending I didn’t see coming: I never took Taxol number 12.
By round 11 my face was reacting, the neuropathy question was hanging over me, and the doctor had already mentioned the option of reducing the dose for the last rounds. When week 12 came, I made a decision that honestly scared me: I skipped the last round. My own choice. I was afraid the side effects would get worse right at the finish line, and some of them are the kind that can stay.
I still took the blood test that Monday, and here’s the funny part: it was fine. According to the nurse, actually better than the week before. So I sat there with excellent blood values, voluntarily not taking my chemo, wondering if I was making a huge mistake. The gap between the last Taxol and the operation suddenly felt very long, and a small voice kept asking if I had ruined everything by skipping one single round.
The doctors and nurses reassured me it was completely fine, and they were right. I can say that with confidence now, because the operation later showed a complete response: no living cancer cells were found in what they removed (that whole story belongs to the operation chapter). So no, one skipped round did not ruin anything.
But I want to be careful here. I’m not telling you that skipping chemo is fine. I made that choice together with my treatment team, at round 11 out of 12, with good blood values and a tumor that was already responding. It was the right choice for me, in my situation, and even then it scared me. If you’re facing a similar question, that’s a conversation for your own team, not for a blog post.
Twelve weeks planned, eleven taken. And with that, chemotherapy was over. Next stop: the operation. But that’s the next chapter.
Did you also find that the weekly chemo was easier in the moment but harder on patience? And if you’ve been through Taxol: did the neuropathy question drive you as crazy as it drove me? I’d love to hear how it was for you.
I’m not a doctor and I won’t give any medical advice. All I share is my personal experience based on my own treatment plan.