Napi Horsemanship

My high grade B cell lymphoma is being treated with EPOCH chemotherapy.

For EPOCH treatment I am admitted to the hospital for at least five days. Sundays are the days I go into the hospital to be admitted and I usually get home by Friday. I check in around 3 in the evening and they do a covid test, pregnancy test, and access my port. With the lidocaine cream I don’t even feel the needle poke for my port.

R –

Rituximab

E –

Etoposide Phosphate

P –

Prednisone

O –

Oncovin/ Vincristine Sulfate

C –

Cyclophosphamide

H –

Hydroxydaunorubicin / Doxonurubicin

There’s a few different bags of treatment in these five days. They start with Rituximab aka Rituxan which is an immunotherapy. It targets any red blood cells with the cancer proteins on them. I have to take Benadryl and Tylenol before I get this bag administered and my vitals are taken every half hour. This is for the allergic reaction that can arise from this type of therapy.

After Rituxan we get down to business and start my four day stretch of continuous chemo. In this bag there are three different drugs; Etoposide, Doxonurubicin (Hydroxydaunorubicin), and Vincristine Sulfate (Oncovin). These bags are bright red giving EPOCH its distinct signature. Slang names for this bag are Red Devil or Fruit Punch. I also have taken to the saying “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid”. It takes about 24 hours for one bag to be administered and I get four bags of it. I usually can get an hour between bags before getting hooked up to the next one.

After four days of the Red Devil I get the Cyclophosphamide. Thankfully this one doesn’t take as long, they can administer it in an hour. I’ve noticed though because it’s my last bag before discharge that they usually will just let it slowly run through the night before I am discharged. This is also the drug that is usually the cause for neurological symptoms. It’s what my doctor told me when I informed him of the slight tingling in my finger tips.

Have you heard of roid rage? Prednisone, a steroid, is given to me twice a day and it comes in a pink pill. I get about five of those pink pills twice a day. They taste god awful and it’s always the first pill I take to get it over with. Roid rage is real and it turns me into a dick. I didn’t understand for the longest time why I was getting so frustrated in the hospital at everything until one of my nurses asked if I was feeling the roid rage. I’m glad she mentioned it because it helped me notice it and to have better control and patience with myself.

I hope you enjoyed my crash course on EPOCH chemo. I will get a little more into symptoms and side effects of this chemo in another post, but as luck would have it I am tolerating chemo extremely well. I hope you enjoyed the information, I even had to find internet sources to make sure I was spelling things correct and supplying information that isn’t wrong. Like the good kid I am, I sited my source below. If you have any questions or anything like that feel free to reach out and contact me!

R-epoch chemotherapy, Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) – the patient story. The Patient Story | For Cancer Patients & Caregivers. (2023, June 15). https://thepatientstory.com/cancer-treatments/chemotherapy/r-epoch-chemotherapy-regimen/