oral chemotherapy

After six months of chemotherapy and a cycle of radiotherapy (my neoadjuvant therapies), I underwent breast surgery to remove my tumor. At this stage, we were hoping for my tumor to be completely gone, or, in other words, for my body to show a full, complete response to the treatment.

Unfortunately, this was not the case. After surgery, the doctors explained to me that there was still residual invasive disease in my body, which meant my chances for a relapse were too high if we didn’t do anything else.

My oncologist advised an extra six months of oral chemotherapy, and in August 2024 I started with capecitabine.

two pictures a day

When I started taking oral chemotherapy, I thought I needed something to help me record the moment, something that would remind me I was going through the extra pain for a reason, in order to survive, to have a real chance at it.

So I started taking pictures of my pills, two pictures a day for every day of chemotherapy. I started on August 7th 2024 and finished on January 14th 2025.

Here is a little schema to help you visualize it:

8 cycles of 3 weeks each = 24 weeks = 6 months
1 cycle = 3 weeks = 2 weeks with pills + 1 week without pills
2 weeks with pills x 8 cycles = 14 days with pills x 8 cycles = 112 days with pills
112 days with pills x 2 pictures a day = 224 pictures

I ended up with 224 pictures, yes.

I am calling this my chemo pills collage, which I discovered is also a pretty visual and intuitive (at least for me) way to look back in time (so perhaps I could also call it my chemo pills calendar?).

I annotated some of the images: you can click the button below to look at some of the hotspots in the collage, and if you hover with your mouse you can see what little memory the picture unlocks¹.

show hotspots

12 hours away

From the pictures names (the files names), I was also able to reconstruct the exact timestamps at which I took my medication on each day of chemotherapy. Using these timestamps, I then calculated the time interval between the morning and evening doses for each day.

This is very simple and you can see how I did it using a small python script.

Why did this matter? At the hospital they told me it was important for me to take the pills with a lot of water and with roughly 12 hours between the two moments. Well, I am a sucker for instructions, and the distribution of the time lags clearly shows it.

You can find the data here. Not sure what you’d want to do with it, but nevertheless :)