I wanted to step back and talk about a shocking new discovery to help me with this chemotherapy-induced nausea that I was introduced to by Dr. Andy Pippas. It is literally a “shocking” find and it is providing me with some real relief at a time when I have needed it the most. After 15 months on Votrient, the nausea, vomiting and my inability to eat has robbed me of energy and left me with a feeling of hopelessness and malaise. On edge. Out of sorts and just irritable. Ask Jill, she’ll tell you.

Dr. Pippas has seen what nausea looks like on the face of a patient. In fact, ALL the patients in his care who are receiving some kind of chemotherapy are probably dealing with some level of nausea if not every day, then certainly around the days when they have some kind of chemotherapeutic infusion. These drugs are very potent and they use their ability to disrupt some kind of pathway to try to keep the cancer cells confused about what good cancer cells do — kill their host.

So, Andy looked at me in his office a fews days ago and said, “You need Nometex.” And he used his thumb and index finger on his wrist like he was adjusting a watch band as he said it. I remember thinking, “Surely he isn’t talking about one of those magnetic bracelets. He better hope that is not the case! I will make giving him hell my next job if that is what he is suggesting.” I love Andy Pippas, but if he needs his chops busted, I’m just the guy to do it. Old age and cancer definitely diminish the effectiveness of a robust, verbal governor. Thankfully, Andy wasn’t trying to slip some kind of snake oil band onto my wrist. He was, in fact, talking about what has turned out to provide me shocking relief from my nausea.

I listened to Dr. Pippas explain the Nometex medical device. He explained that it is a drug-free, non-invasive prescription therapy with no drug interaction complications. The device is designed to be recommended to patients whose nausea and vomiting have NOT been controlled with standard anti-emetic regimens. I knew that my Zofran, Phenergan, Marinol therapies were missing the mark because a person who isn’t nauseated, doesn’t sleep with a vomit bucket on the floor beside the bed. And more often than not, the first hint that I’m sick happens as I first wake up, sometimes in the middle of the night out of dead sleep. The smell of food cooking makes me sick. The thought of eating meat makes me sick. The other things that make me sick are a mystery until they happen. It is almost like air, sometimes, makes me sick. Go figure!

We were told that the device requires a doctor’s prescription and that they weren’t sure how our insurance would treat it and that it would cost, before insurance, between $150 and $180 to get it. I started doing a mental calculation of recent co-pays, colored by my realization that we’ve just come through a lovely holiday that required that we spend some money on gifts for our friends and family, so I really wasn’t interested in forking over that much money for something I wasn’t sure would work.

I’m a writer, for goodness sake, I thought. I’ll just get in touch with the Nometex folks and see if I can get one of them to try out. Then I can give it a good trial and write about my experiences with this new anti-nausea therapy. So that is what I did. Out of complete transparency, I want to disclose that I have received a complimentary sample of the device and have been trying it out for several days during the worst of the nausea I’ve experienced since the cancer diagnosis.

Let me tell you how this thing works: First, let me tell you that it DOES work for me. If I feel nausea coming on, I fish the bracelet out of my pocket, put a drop of gel on the inside of my right wrist and strap the bracelet on in just the right spot, so that the median nerve responds to the light shock it receives every four seconds. The shock goes right up through the palm of my hand and out between my “bird” finger and my ring finger. I guess that must be why they call it the median nerve. It is right in the middle of your hand.

What is supposed to happen inside your body is that the median nerve triggers the “vomit center” of the brain via the vagus nerve. This gentle pulsing stimulation seems to work to disrupt that nausea reflex when I wear the bracelet and have it turned on. And, the best part, is that it works in less than five minutes. It quickly makes the nausea go away!

I will ask Dr. Pippas for a prescription for the Nometex device next time I’m in his office. Now that I know it works for me, I won’t want to be without one in my pocket should the need arise. The other thing I found out during my research of the Nometex device is that patients who have pacemakers should take care to make sure they follow directions for the proper use of the device.