Photo: CTV

Prince is livestreaming her chemotherapy treatment

A Windsor woman is doing all she can to fight the stigmas surrounding cancer treatment.

Michelle Prince livestreamed her regular chemotherapy session and answered viewer questions about what it’s like to undergo treatment.

Prince has had colon cancer since 2014, and is now in Stage 4 of the disease, meaning the cancer has spread to other organs in her body.

On Monday morning, she is undergoing her 56th round of chemo to try to beat back the tumours for a while.

After so many treatments, Prince has become a bit of a first-hand expert on chemotherapy. But, like so many other cancer patients, when Prince went in for her first session, she had no idea what to expect. No one in her family had ever had cancer, and even internet searches didn’t give her much of an idea about what it would be like.

“That deer-in-the-headlights feeling, and having no control over what was going to happen next, was utterly terrifying,” she said

“…So I thought if we could pull back the curtain and show people what it’s like, people will think ‘ Ok, this is doable. I can do this’,” she said.

Prince said she fell for chemo stereotypes herself, and thought the chemo centre would be filled with people with no hair, who were sick and vomiting.

“When I got here, it was a completely different experience than I anticipated,” she said.

Prince says every cancer patient’s treatment is different, but for her, a chemo session typically lasts about 90 minutes while she waits for the bag of medicine to empty into her arm through an IV.

She expects that about halfway through the session, she’ll start to get tired and lose her energy. But she hopes that knowing that she is helping others by answering questions they may have will help energize her.

“I really want to engage the audience and have them ask any questions that they can to make them feel better and that actually energizes me,” she said.

-with files from CTV