There’s a lot of terminology when it comes to cancer treatments, chemo “cycles” is one of the ones that cause a lot of confusion amongst new patients.
A cycle can contain multiple chemotherapy sessions and it can vary in number of days or weeks. There are multiple chemo cycles in one treatment plan.
Let’s take my first Chemotherapy treatment plan as an example, one cycle was two weeks and I was scheduled for 12 cycles. Making the whole plan last 6 months. Because chemo can start on any day of the week or month, we don’t use calendar dates to track time within a cycle so my two week cycle would be 14 days.
- Day 1 I would have Oxaliplatin, Irinotecan and 5fu
- Day 2 I would continue the 5fu
- Day 3 5fu would finish
- Day 4 I would take Neulasta to help with my white blood cells
- Days 5-14 were recovery days where I didn’t have to take any scheduled meds.
That’s the end of the cycle, the next day, which would be Day 15 is the start of a new cycle and so the day resets to Day 1.
Compare that to now (Aug 2020) I have a 28 day cycle:
- Day 1: Lonsurf and Avastin
- Days 2-5: Lonsurf
- Days 6&7: Recovery
- Days 8-12: Lonsurf
- Days 13&14: Recovery
- Day 15: Avastin and Zarzio
- Days 16-19: Zarzio
- Days 20-28: Recovery
The thing to take from this is that no matter how long your cycles are, its the number of cycles that is used to plan your treatment. Which is why we’re all on chemo for different lengths of time.
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