There’s a printout on the fridge now, a schedule listing all the days I get zapped. Each morning when I get home, I cross one off. I have done it eight times now: it is immensely satisfying as an epilogue to each treatment.
Radiation itself – as a treatment – is not all that hard when compared to getting chemo. I check in with my custom-made ID card and change into a johnny if I’m wearing clothes that will interfere with the machine. The waiting area is actually quite lovely, more like a terrarium than a hospital box, with a full wall of windows looking out over a garden of flowers.
When the techs are ready, they double-check my ID, take me into the treatment room, and help me up onto the bed. I lie face down on the same man-shaped hard plastic thing, which is covered by a sheet. Then two techs talk math at each other while they gently tug the sheet – and my body – in different directions. I can’t see what they are doing, but I know they have to make sure I’m positioned precisely, so the little tattooed dots are lining up with whatever the machine uses to orient itself.
During the procedure itself I lie there for about six or seven minutes, hugging the front of the bed to keep my arms out of the way, with my head and my feet propped up on foam blocks. The machine itself slowly circles around me, whirring and humming, doing its thing. I never look or watch because I know there are multiple lasers involved. Instead, I listen. When the whirring stops, the techs come back out and start removing the foam blocks. I get down from the bed, pick up my stuff, and that’s that. It is a brief, smooth, and painless process beginning to end.
This painlessness doesn’t mean radiation is without challenges or side effects. Even though my treatments are brief and we live pretty close to the hospital, it is downright inconvenient to have to go every weekday. Frankly, I don’t know how people do it if they are working, or if they have to adhere to normal life’s rhythm for some other reason.
I’m also not sure how I’m going to manage once the side effects start to overwhelm me. The gastrointestinal chaos is already difficult as I wrote about last week, and I still haven’t quite mastered the right combination of drugs I need to take. Fatigue-wise I’m doing better, which makes me think I was still feeling the chemo. However, I’ve been warned that radiation-driven fatigue starts about two weeks after the first treatment, and I’m rapidly approaching that tipping point.
Right now, I’m trying to enjoy the things I can enjoy. My taste buds are coming back online, my hair and eyebrows are growing back in. The only things keeping me awake at night are the ordinary nocturnal habits of our cats and our neighbors. Going through chemo taught me that there’s no sense in borrowing trouble. The side effects of radiation are going to be what they are going to be, and I won’t know which ones will bother me until they’re happening.
medicinal sausage 