Oxaliplatin is a chemotherapy drug, used, in the case of my wife Dee, to fight her advanced colon cancer. Oxaliplatin came with the warnings of some severe side effects, which were supposed to be very rare, but somehow I don’t think they are as rare as advertised. Dee came down with every one of them, and even had a side effect that her oncologist had never heard of. Eventually, although we felt that it was a very effective agent in the fight against her cancer, we decided that the side effects were too tough to cope with and switched to another drug.
Dee was diagnosed with Stage Four colon cancer in February and had a huge tumor removed from her colon a week later. Luckily the cancer had not gone elsewhere except for the fatty tissue in her abdomen, but her doctor decided to stage the cancer at a four so she would be able to receive oxaliplatin. The first chemo was done intravenously, as soon as Dee was well enough after the surgery to have it. An hour into the procedure, she felt a burning, tingling sensation in her arm that only got worse. The pain became almost unbearable, and she was barely able to make it through the chemo session. It subsided a day later, but she swore she would not go through that again. She related that it felt as if her entire arm were on fire.
Told that the oxaliplatin might make her nauseous and dizzy, Dee was wary, but when she was warned that one of the more uncommon side effects was a poor tolerance to cold she was not that alarmed. Unfortunately, she found out what a horrible mistake that was. After her treatment, on her way to the car in the chilly air, her throat began to spasm and close up, making breathing next to impossible. She avoided the temptation to panic and the swelling subsided quickly enough, but she learned a valuable lesson. Any exposure at all to anything even remotely cold was dangerous and unforgettably painful.
She could not go in the refrigerator for anything without wearing gloves, for example, and there was no such thing as enjoying a cold drink as long as she was on oxaliplatin. Dee was told that this reaction to cold would be gone in three to five days, but in her case it lasted a full ten both times she had the treatment. She was so sensitive to cold that she could not even stand on the cool tiles of the bathroom floor in her bare feet, or pains would shoot through them. The pain she experienced with every gulp of water or first bite of food was also disconcerting to say the least, as her throat was quite sensitive to everything. Dee described a feeling sometimes akin to having a hair in your throat, or more than one, and being unable to clear it from it. She could not be an air-conditioned room or even think of bathing in anything but hot water.
Her fingertips and toes also began to tingle, and it was difficult for her to grasp anything at all. Periodic bouts of vomiting followed these oxaliplatin infusions, the second of which she had to receive from a port that was surgically implanted in the left side of her chest, to avoid having to be given the drug intravenously. Without warning she would feel the need to throw up, and often just got to the toilet or a wastebasket in time. This side effect was more expected, as vomiting is common with many chemo agents, but this did not make it any more pleasant.
The side effect from oxaliplatin that even her doctor had never seen was the most sinister. Every time Dee’s eyes teared up she would have stabbing pains reverberate through them, almost as if “someone were shoving two long needles into them.” This made it incredibly painful to cry, so she was denied even that release in some of the most trying times of her life. At first her oncologist didn’t understand what she was trying to tell him about this effect, instead thinking that she meant her eyes were dry and could not produce tears. However, he finally got it, and when he looked online to see if this was related to the oxaliplatin, he found just two other similar reactions in the entire country to the drug.
He also explained that this particular side effect from oxaliplatin could be more widespread, but had gone unreported since apparently a vast majority of the doctors do not take the time to fill out the lengthy forms that are supposed to be used to document these cases. This pain in the eyes when they teared up also lasted more than ten days. After two treatments of the oxaliplatin, Dee had a problem with her port, and her chemo was suspended for a short time. When it resumed she was on a much “milder” chemo agent that had none of the same side effects. She is now in remission, probably in no small part to the role that the oxaliplatin played, as Dee could not imagine any cancer cells living through such a toxic treatment. One last note on oxaliplatin. When we received the insurance statements, we were dumbfounded when we saw how much one bag of it cost- eight thousand dollars!
