Third radiation treatment today.
It's such a hard process--NOT! Although I am surprised by the size of what we're radiating. I was expecting a 3x1" little horizontal strip in the bend of my left leg. Instead, it's about a 2" wide by 6" long VERTICAL strip that starts about the bend of my leg and heads north, covering about 1/4 of my stomach. It has to do with how the two lymph node chains that had Hodgkins lay in my body.
So, for every day, Monday through Friday, for 14 treatments, I get to follow the same routine.
Leave the house around 10:35 a.m. to go about 2 miles south to the north side of American Fork Hospital. Hold mask in place as I check in at the left side of the oncologists' offices. Head back to the treatment room.
Meet Dana, Katy, and Kelsey and head into the treatment room. Expose my stomach, which is easiest if I wear a skirt, and lay a towel across it. Lay on a hard metal table. Wait while the three technicians line up the stickers on my body (one on each hip and one in the middle of my stomach) with three different lasers in the room. Lay heavy so that they're respositioning me, sometimes by micro amounts, and I'm not trying to help them by moving myself. Otherwise, I move too much and it takes longer to correctly align my body.
They can shape the radiation beams now so the heavy leaded shields that I remember from childhood are a thing of the past. The outline drawn on my stomach matches the radiation field that's programmed into the machine.
After about five minutes of positioning, which is the longest part of the entire processs, we're ready to start the treatment. The technicians retreat behind about a 6" leaded thick door. Sure. They get to retreat to safety, while I'm feeling pretty vulnerable. Oh well.
Are you ready for this?
I lay as still as I can, while breathing normally, and count while a loud buzzing noise sounds from the huge round machine head that's positioned about 8" above my stomach. One thousand one, one thousand two. . . The buzzing stops when I get to 12 seconds. 12 seconds? That's all? Wow!
Then the machine rotates 180 degrees and reverses the radiation field on it's screen, so it's now positioned directly under me. The buzzing starts again and I count to 10 seconds this time.
We're done! The technicians come back into the room, move the table out from under the machine, and I'm free to adjust my clothing and leave.
By the time we drive back home, it's been less than thirty minutes since we walked out the door. Now that's fast. I seem to recall having to lay still for at least 15 or 20 minutes as a child for each treatment.
Today's radiation is so much more precise. I'm getting half the dose I did as a child and we can radiate the back side also (because one of the lymph node chains curves and starts heading back towards the spine so it's easier to treat it from the back).
It really pays to speak up. Remember that, Trish! It didn't make sense to me to have permanent tattoos for about 2.5 weeks of treatments. Why be permanently marked? So I asked if there were any alternatives. Ta duh--the stickers! A small cross on each hip to line up rotation of my body, then another small cross in the middle of the radiation field on my stomach. Two more stickers define the top and bottom of the radiation fields. That's it. They work great and have needed to be changed only once.
Hurray for modern medicine advances. And no long-term side effects!
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