On Thanksgiving 6 Years Ago I Was Bald

This is what the holiday was like during cancer treatment.

Me and my family at a local Brooklyn restaurant the Thanksgiving I was in cancer treatment, November 2018

It was a Carbo week. As I was falling asleep one night at the beginning of this week this thought popped into my head: Thanksgiving six years ago was a Carbo week.

My chemo regimen for ovarian cancer consisted of two chemotherapy drugs: Carbo (carboplatin) and Taxel (paclitaxel). I got chemo infusions every week for nine weeks leading up to my surgery in January 2019, and then again, weekly for nine weeks after my surgery.

The nine weeks was broken down into three consecutive cycles of three weeks each, with each cycle looking like this:

Week 1: Carbo AND Taxel

Week 2: Taxel ONLY

Week 3: Taxel ONLY

The Taxel made me lose my hair, but the Carbo was what made me feel like a cancer patient — horribly sick and nauseous.

“You have to get ahead of the nausea,” a friend who was a young breast cancer survivor advised me early on after my diagnosis, before I even started chemo. “Once it sets in,” she warned, “it’s too late.”