More of What I Did on My Summer Vacation
30 August 2024
Time for a health update, methinks! Not to much dilly-dallying with other topics today, just the blood and guts stuff. Still trying to figure out my, you know, blog strategy.
Let’s just say it helps that I am a very curious person. Because some of the new things I’ve gotten to learn about and experience vis-a-vis cancer treatments have been, interesting to say the least. You wanna put what, where? Oh. Interesting!
Officially, my treatments end on 12 Sept, if all goes to plan, so I’m in the last stretch. Is final stretch a horse-racing expression? Not sure, but for the record, I do not condone horse-racing. Just to be clear. At this juncture, I have 3 more internal radiation treatment-surgery thingies, 1 more chemo, and 3 more external beam radiation treatments.
The external beam is what I described last time, but here’s a review for the keen. You fill your bladder (so many adventures with this!) and empty your other storage tank in the same area, then just pop up on this slab table thing with your legs in a cozy mold of your own legs to keep you still — and the weirdly comfortable rectangular pillow! — and then the table moves around and a huge machine moves around you and you get zapped by photons through your body. You don’t feel anything. It’s quite chill really. About 3 pop-songs later, some eager young technicians fetch you and off to the pee-room you sprint. It’s just the hour drive each way that can be a bit much… but to be honest it’s bothered me a lot less than I thought it would. As long as there isn’t hideous traffic, I’ve been fine merrily listening to my audiobooks and thinking. I’ll be doing that today. Then 2 more next week.
The chemo regimen is intended as a “booster” to the radiation. Though, in a way that’s the exact wrong word, because it works by weakening the cancer cells, or “de-boosting” them, to coin a phrase. The drug weakens the cancer cells, making them more susceptible to the radiation zapping. The drug I’m on for this “chemoradiation” is called Cisplatin and it has had fewer side-effects issues for me than the 2 drug regimen I was on the first half of the summer — though it’s unpredictable and I try to do a lot of prophylactic measures to avoid unpleasantness. I really need to learn to spell prophylactic without looking it up, as it is quite a useful word for all sorts of things. I get this drug through IV with some other bonus stuff like magnesium and side-effects-counter-medicines and two giganto bags of IV fluids. So you know, more pee. I am very well-hydrated. (I actually think this is a big factor in feeling so well as I have done.)
Then there’s the internal radiation therapy. This is the “fun” one. The procedure is called brachytherapy and involves the implantation of sealed metal capsules containing Iridium-192 (in my case). These capsules are placed directly on my tumor sites internally through a surgical procedure under full anesthesia. They kind of sew them in there, I gather. Stitches and tape. I did not request a picture. After the surgery, they spin me through a CT Scan to make sure everything looks right, then I get to lay still for several hours with all that stuff in there, while the radiation oncology surgeon, a physicist, and a dosimetrist make a plan. I feel like there’s some “what if a dosimetrist a physicist… walk into a bar…” joke but I’ll leave it to you to come up with your own. Eventually, I go into a radiation suite (where they have plastered Monet’s Waterlillies all over the place leading me to wonder what Monet would have made of it) and they literally plug in the nuclear pods to a radiation source machine and turn it on. The actually being irradiated part takes less than 10 minutes. Then they come in and remove all the stuff and snip and untape and voilà, I am free to go back into that room where I hung out for all those hours until I convince them I am a hoppy bunny and am ready to hop on home.
Again, this sounded like it was going to be a lot worse than it actually is. I think that the care the team take (and there are a lot of people involved) to assure every stage is comfortable is a boon. It’s the little things in these situations that can make things a lot worse and you wouldn’t even know what to ask for to make it better. Also, again, being curious is helpful. Much more useful than being anxious, which, to my surprise, I’ve really managed not to be. Go me.
Oh, the best part is that the surgery for this is called Tandem and Ovoid Placement which I think is a A+ post-rock band name.
But also reminds me of the 1939 World’s Fair a little.
The thing with these surgery days is that I have to wake up at 4:30am to get to the hospital which is, a bit off-putting. It’s a very long day, but hey, I get to be anesthetized during some off it.
With this type of cancer and treatment, the radiation keeps working to shrink the offending cells for some months after the active zapping and drugging is done, so they don’t actually do any official diagnostic scans as active treatment ends. However, in prep for the internal radiation treatments, I did have an MRI last week and it showed good progress in my tumor and cancerous cells having shrunk a good deal. Not the type of scan where they can measure exactly, but my doctor was very pleased with the progress, and so am I. I asked her how it looked on visual examination yesterday (when I started, there was visible tumor sticking out) and she said it looked “obliterated” which sounded right jolly to me.
Tandem and Ovoid’s first single “Obliterated inside”.
The post More of What I Did on My Summer Vacation first appeared on Annielog Non-Analog Annie Log.