That relief feeling is good. I know my imagination tends to be worse than the reality of it.
There are many, many different chemo drugs and protocols. My chemo was every Monday for six weeks while my radiation was 5 days a week for the same six weeks. My chemo was intended to make the radiation work better. They gave me Paclitaxel followed by Carboplatin each time - this is a pretty common combination. I had a real bad reaction the first time - they had to stop the infusion. But they gave me some other drugs to help me tolerate the chemo and then it went well. They gave me common stuff like benadryl, pepcid, some steroid and maybe some other stuff but it worked. From then on they would start with that stuff before the chemo.
I did not lose my hair, at least not much of it. I was getting a little thin in spots before and I really can't tell if it is thinning faster or not - maybe. I did get a little sick from the chemo but honestly it wasn't as bad as I was imagining it would be. Starting with week 3 I would get a fever of about 103 in the middle of the night after chemo day and had to go to the ER following their instructions. They say to go in if you get a fever over 100.4 degrees. No good reason found for the fever, no infections or anything, and it would go down after a few hours with ibuprofen and acetaminophen. Just the way my body reacted and it was mostly just inconvenient for that night. I didn't really feel "normal" during those weeks but very hard to describe.
I had fairly minor issues with the radiation as well. I would talk to other patients while waiting for treatment and I gathered I got by fairly easy. Little sore throat, some chest pains and some minor skin burn.
Overall I was very thankful to get those treatments from some very nice people in those areas.