The New Radio-Active

The Mile High Oncology Radiation Oncology Clinic is staffed by a bunch of grrls who AreGonnaGetYOuWELL!  The positive vibe envelopes you when you walk in.  You don't mind when they take a mesh mask and peg your head firmly to a table so you can't move.

Radiation is now the crux of my routine.  Get up, make the morning coffee and macha, feed the puppies, break the news to the kitten that she canNOT go out in the snow because we won't be home for a couple hours to let her back in, call insurance companies, juggle bills, then try to eat breakfast.

Radiation and chemo, which I'm doing simultaneously, can each have side effects.  So far I've dodged most of those except the tastebud thing, which is best expressed by this: YUCK. Yuck, my lips taste horrible, most food is only good for a bite or two, and MANY things zing the revulsion button.  This explains the pep talk I got earlier this week by an oncology nurse who began regailing me her Big Recipe ("Try putting Glucerna or something like that in the blender with ice and a banana!")  Being a Big Girl, I shook her off.  I can afford to lose more than a few pounds.  She kept at me.  "If it's a mealtime." she said, "Eat even when you're not hungry!"   Most people lose between 25 and 60 pounds on chemo, apparently. At the top of the med sheet in blazing caps it screams, "DO NOT TRY TO LOSE WEIGHT ON CHEMOTHERAPY!"

I stopped trying to lose weight on principal years ago. That principal no longer applies to me or my life.  Now (cue BeeGees) everything is pretty much about just stayin' alive.

Radiation is a 15-minute visit that's 45 minutess away.  Getting there and back was a big logistic, until the quarantines.  Suddenly Jim and my friend Kim are pretty housebound, so they don't actually mind running me all over town, particularly in the new light traffic.

Radiation is quick and much nicer than an MRI.  For one thing you're not in a tube.  You're just lying on a table in an open room as a machine with lots of panels and screens spins slowly around you.  It's comical if you open your eyes occasionally because it looks like the machine is curious about you and pops up periodically to get yet another look.  The blazing red and green lights do have a piercing laser-y quality, though, so I tend to keep my eyes mostly closed.

The burning flesh and metallic smells and itchy headache pop up when it's almost done, but it's not excruciating or even unpleasant.  It's just that by the time we've driven home I feel like I'm halfway up a fourteener and just need a dark room and a blankee and No Damn Calls To Make for a couple hours.

For people unfamiliar with radiation or how it works, I think it's pretty ingenious.  A very weak beam of radiation comes through one side of my skull.  Another weak beam intersects it from another angle.  Where they intersect the radiation is intense enough to fry tumor cells.  This IS an exact science-I can't think of anything more exact (one nurse was bragging on the clinic's physicist, saying "He's the smartest person I've ever met.".  The radiation oncologist was happily geeking over the location of the 94%-removed tumor because it's nowhere near my brain stem or visual centers.  So, ir's relatively easy to treat without risk of life-compromising brain damage like blindness.  Not everyone with brain tumors gets so lucky.

 My next MRI is in mid-May and until then we don't know much.

That's the thing about cancer.   Everything becomes a might.

I don't have my feet under me to do that with ease every day yet.  But again, I'm not past the first 100 days, although apparently odds are I will be alive long enough to make that adjustment.