Radiation starts

                 People keep asking me when my radiation treatments will start.  That means I’m overdue to update the blog, because the treatments started last week.

                The effect of the radiation is cumulative.  I will eventually have a sunburn-like reaction, but not for a couple of weeks.  They tell you to buy a lotion made from marigolds because they’ve discovered that marigolds produce chemicals that are beneficial for radiation burns. It has a nasty chemical smell.

                They say the radiation might make me tired. Hey, I’m already tired.  But the process is mostly painless.  The first day, it was harder, because I had to maintain a really uncomfortable position for 45 minutes while they took lots of x-rays.  This messed up a tendon in my thumb, of all things. But otherwise it’s been okay.

                The machine they use, a linear accelerator, inspires a weird mix of awe and gratitude and absolute creepiness.  It’s not something that makes a person think, “Yes, I should get naked and lie down in front of that.”  Of course, it is amazing that they can pinpoint-target nuclear energy with such precision.  But it feels wrong, unnatural, to be the target.  You think about the hero firemen who got irradiated at Chernobyl.  You think about the book Hiroshima.  You think about that series they just ran in the New York Times about all the things that can and do go wrong in nuclear medicine.  But now they are drawing on you with blue Sharpies. They have put two real but tiny tattoos on your breastbone and armpit and the therapist lights them up with red laser beams like she was about to unload a smart bomb in your general direction. She hides behind a wall of concrete and lead.

                It’s time-consuming, an hour drive each way, five times a week, but the treatment itself only takes a few minutes. On Tuesdays, it’s longer, because you get to talk to your radiologist.

                She asks if I’m still having any weird side-effects from the chemotherapy—which ended in mid-July.  Yes, the left hand is still kind of numb, the eyes are still messed up, the stomach still has some issues.  She says that, in truth, I probably won’t feel normal until maybe January of next year.  Wow. Not even my oncologist ever admitted that.

                But she says I’ll have some hair by the time we’re done with radiation, in November. And the brain seems to be coming out of the fog a little bit.  All my life, I have drawn and painted.  I haven’t drawn or painted anything since March, because the chemo truly messed up my brain.  I couldn’t think hard enough to actually draw anything.  But I’ve started sketching again.  I hope this means the brain cells are not dead, they’re just stunned.

Fat Tire? Or Flat Tire?

                It’s almost four weeks since my surgery, and an update is overdue.  Sorry for the delay!

                The surgery went well.  No complications so far.  The anesthesiologist was great. I had told him that eight years ago, after my emergency C-section when I had Matthew, I had been horribly nauseous.  Nothing like that that this time, the guy was on top of it.  I spent one night in the hospital, and came home uneventfully.

                It was a bit of a bummer, though, when my surgeon spoke to John after the surgery.  They had removed nine lymph nodes, and they still found cancer cells in six of them. When I spoke with the surgeon two days later, she told me not to worry about this; it was what she had expected and it was something we could deal with using drugs and radiation. However, I didn’t really believe her.  From what I had heard and read, this was news that could actually decrease my life expectancy.  I began to feel like I really was going to die of this, and I began to feel pretty down.

                Happily, I have met with both my surgeon and my oncologist since then, and both of them are pretty optimistic.  My oncologist said it would have of course been better if all the cancer had been wiped out by the chemo, but the chemo did take a big chunk out of it.  The main tumors had greatly shrunk and most of what remained in the lymph nodes was in the process of dying.  That bodes well for our chances of having eliminated any cancer cells wandering through my bloodstream.

                My surgeon said that in my gloomy appraisal of the situation, I had not accounted for the type of cancer I have.  The kind I have is fairly non-aggressive and very dependent on estrogen.  So first we nuke it with radiation, and then I take Tamoxifen for the next several years, and that should handle whatever is left.

                I also have some new lifestyle guidelines.  I am supposed to exercise every day, because this kind of cancer does not like a revved-up metabolism.  I am supposed to limit my alcohol intake, because this kind of cancer responds to metabolized alcohol the way it does to estrogen.  Depending on which of my doctors you ask, that means no more than three or seven drinks a week. Neither the exercise nor the alcohol limits should be too hard for me.

                The doctors differed a little on the question of fat.  Estrogen levels are related to fat.  One of the doctors said that means I should eat a low-fat diet.  The other one said that diet theory has been largely refuted by the science, and that what I should be doing instead is to get to a healthy weight. Either way, this will be the hardest part for me.  I’m about 20 pounds overweight, and most of what I eat is high-fat.  So I am going to be working on this, but it won’t be pretty.

                Anyway, both doctors assured me that my situation is not dire.  They both offered to put me in touch with other women who had very similar illnesses to mine, who are still going strong 20 years later. So I am trying to switch gears from feeling like I am dying, to feeling like I am going to be here for a long time and I had better figure out what to do when I grow up…

                Meanwhile, the plastic surgeon has been happy with the way things are going.  They’ve basically put a water balloon in there, with a metal valve in it.  Every week, they blow the balloon up bigger, until it gets big enough to hold the space while we do several weeks of radiation.  Some time down the road, we remove the water balloon and replace it with a proper implant.  They can’t get make the space any bigger after radiation, so they have to do it now.  This has all been very surreal, to watch them inflate half of my chest like a basketball.

                “Let us know if it deflates suddenly,” they said.  “That’s called ‘a flat tire.’ It’s just saline, so it’s not dangerous, but we have to fix it sooner rather than later.”

                How do you fix it, I asked.

                “We change your tire,” they said.  Duh.

                They also said I am under NO circumstances to have an MRI of any kind on any part of my body.  That would result in a catastrophic tire blowout they said, basically explosively sucking the tire right out of my chest. They didn’t need to tell me that twice.

                I go for my first radiation appointment tomorrow, where they make the custom mask or stencil or whatever they call it.  That takes a while. A shout out to my friends for entertaining Matthew while I am down there in DC!