I was determind to be a good patient too--and determined to be tough in some ways. I wasn't vocal enough about my pain quickly enough and then I tended to underuse the pain meds given to me. I waited until one dose wore off and I was in serious pain before taking the next dose, which makes it harder for the med to actually relieve the pain than when you just take it every X hours and don't let the pain get started. When I ended up in the hospital at the end of treatment due to burns and cellulitis and the nurses took over giving me pain meds all of a sudden I "got it" in terms of how they were supposed to work!

I was also a real tough guy in terms of the amifostine. It made me violently sick to my stomach almost every single day they gave it to me (which was most days of radiation. Often the intensity of the vomiting was so strong it would make me pee in my pants as well (and I normally don't have issues with this)! But I was determined to keep going with it because I thought it represented hope of a future in which I had a good amount of saliva and that not doing it would mean no saliva. It turns out neither of those things is probably true--it only helps 50% of the time and with IMRT I should have recovered some saliva anyway (actually I still fight some serious drymouth issues, even taking the max dose of salagen so I'm not sure either amifostine or IMRT helped me much). When I had the second chemo, the amifostine on top of that made me so seriously ill I was puking during the radiation and they agreed I should stop for a while then do every other day. I still do't know if I should be proud of myself that altogether I got through 24 amifostine treatments or if this was really a stupid tough-guy thing (apparently that's way more than most people get through, something I didn't really know until towards the end).

Nelie