Well this is my experience. Sorry its not all pink and positive. Stage 4 triple negative age 36. I wish you the best, but be prepared just incase.

I didn’t get sick from chemo. Not the first three months, anyway. No vomiting in trash cans, no days curled around the toilet. My hair stayed, too—still brushing it out in the morning like nothing had changed. I remember thinking maybe I was lucky, maybe I’d be the exception. I know better now. Losing your hair isn’t just a side effect; it’s proof the drugs are hitting something. When it doesn’t fall out, when you don’t feel sick, you start to wonder if it’s working at all. And when the chemo fails, you understand that the quiet was a warning, not a blessing.

The worst sickness wasn’t from the drugs. It was the in-between: that stretch from the last infusion to the three-month scans. You walk out of the center feeling “fine,” and then you live in limbo. Every twinge becomes a question. Every night you lie there bargaining with your own body—please let it be shrinking, please let the numbers move. Nobody tells you that waiting makes you sicker than any infusion ever did.

You get attached to the nurses in ways people outside don’t understand. They’re the ones who find a vein when you’re dehydrated, who bring you your favorite blanket without you asking, who compliment you on your new wig or eyelashes and actually mean it. You confide in them because they’re there every week, steady. And then a scan comes back bad, or a treatment gets pulled, and you see it in their eyes first—that flicker of sadness they try to hide behind a quick “We’ll figure out the next step.” They’ve seen this movie before. They know what the pause means

I’ve had three treatments fail. You show up on infusion day—book in your bag, snacks, the chair you always sit in—and they tell you you can’t go back today. Not because you’re too sick, but because insurance hasn’t approved the new plan yet. You sit there, port accessed and ready, and then they have to flush it and send you home. That day, the day you don’t get treatment, makes you feel sicker than the drugs ever did. The helplessness settles in your chest and stays.

The whiplash of this journey is absolutely exhausting. After cycling through three different treatments, I finally had a scan that showed no progression—a brief, beautiful moment of relief. But that hope was brutally short-lived. The latest scans reveal the treatment failed shortly after that good report, and it has now spread to my chest and neck. To be met with failure after failure leaves me feeling heavy, devastated, and fighting to find my footing in the ruins of what I thought was a victory.

They don’t tell you how scary it is to watch the room change. The infusion center becomes a small, strange family—same faces week after week, same jokes about the bad coffee. And then someone’s chair is empty. Then another. Some of them were on the same drug as you. You feel guilty that yours is working, and guilty again when it stops. Survivor’s guilt in a recliner, hooked up to a pole.

Chemo doesn’t just work. Not for everyone. Even if you have the same cancer, your mutations are yours. Your DNA is yours. I never knew that until I had cancer—how specific it all is, how two people with the same diagnosis can be on completely different roads. I thought cancer was one thing. It’s a thousand tiny differences, and the drugs only fit some of them.

So no, I didn’t get sick at first. I kept my hair. And I learned the hard way that the hardest parts aren’t always the ones they warn you about.