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If you’ll be getting an anthracycline, it’s what we call a potent vesicant. That means when you deliver the chemotherapy, should it leak, it can cause some serious damage and what we call necrosis or destruction to the tissues where it leaks into. For that reason, you will probably, and should, have a central line placed or a peripheral line that goes and functions like a central line. These things are called ports, which can go under your skin, or it can be a line that’s inserted to the inside of your arm, as well as down near your wrist, that you’ll keep for several weeks or months during the duration of your therapy. One thing that may happen when you get an anthracycline like daunorubicin or doxorubicin is something called radiation recall. So if you had, say, lung cancer or breast cancer, and you received radiation, giving the chemotherapy can actually cause an accentuation or a pronounced appearance of redness, or what may even look somewhat like congestion, where you had your radiation. Those vessels, and the redness, just really kind of accentuate.
You want to make your doctor aware, especially if you have a new oncologist and had radiation in the past, that you had radiation to that area for radiation recall. Some of the other side effects of doxorubicin and daunorubicin are diarrhea, nausea, and GI upset. And what we call mucositis, which is painful lesions in your mouth and other mucosal tissues. These things you want to make your oncologist aware of, because if that mucositis or the diarrhea is making it hard for you to stay up on your nutrition and the foods you need and the fluids you need, we need to know so that we can give you those fluids with a bag or control the mucositis by decreasing the inflammation. You definitely want to communicate with your oncologist so we can give you the nutritional support and volume during the course of these treatments to keep you healthy and have a good quality of life. Both of these drugs do cause hair loss, which usually comes back once you’ve completed them. One interesting thing you might notice that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a problem is one to two days after you’re getting your chemotherapy, you may notice your urine is red or orange. That is something that we see after delivery of these anthracyclines.
