X-ray vision

Imagine yourself laying down.  Get comfortable.  Relax.  Not too bad, huh?

Well, your hands are gripping two posts up by your head, and your head and neck are squished between these posts so that they don't move around.  Not quite as comfortable.

And the table you're on is hard.  Very hard.

And even if you initially got yourself into a reasonable position, the techs may move you around a few mm here or there to get the lasers to line up with your tattoos.  So now you might be bent in subtle, yet odd and uncomfortable, ways.

And you have to remain still.  Completely, absolutely, perfectly still.

If this goes on for about 15 minutes, it's not particularly pleasant, but it's not really all that bad.

At 30 minutes, it's getting to be significantly more unpleasant.  Anything that was mildly uncomfortable at the beginning is starting to get to be actually painful.

After about an hour it's ... well ... I was going to say almost unbearable, but I don't want to risk derision from any female readers who might chide me for not knowing what the hell I'm talking about and that I should get back to them after I've gone through childbirth.  Nevertheless, it's pretty damn unpleasant at that point, and something that I hope I don't have to repeat.

That kind of sums up how I feel about radiation.  The good news is that if everything goes like it's supposed to go, the entire treatment only lasts about 15 minutes.  But not all days are like that.  I've had a couple that were probably closer to 30 minutes.  But the one that got me really complaining (and probably without that I wouldn't have even thought it of enough significance to devote this much blog space to) was the first day.  Or what was supposed to be the first day.  This was almost 2 weeks ago now.  The first day is supposed to be longer than the rest, because there's a simulation and verification step before the actual treatment where they make sure that everything is exactly the way they want it to be, and do a dry run of what the treatment will be, before doing the actual treatment.  But in my case, for reasons that I still don't completely understand but have gotten to the point that I don't really care that much as long as it doesn't happen again, after more than an hour they still hadn't managed to get through that first pre-treatment part, and they concluded that it just wasn't going to work out that day.  So not only did I have to go through all of that, but it was totally for nothing, and we had to try again the next day.  Luckily the next day only took about 30 minutes.  And most (but not all) days since have indeed been much quicker.

The actual radiation only takes up a tiny amount of time.  I get three zaps, one coming from the left front, one coming from the right front, and one coming from the back.  The entire time of active radiation is well under a minute.  It might even be a bit under 15 seconds -- I haven't tried to count it very precisely.

For some reason the tattoos alone aren't quite enough.  The first day they drew the fields on me for the front two beams.  See the picture below.  This gives you a bit of an idea of how large of a tumor I had.  One of the reasons for radiation isn't just to deal with any remaining tumor that might be present, but to clean up any possible stray bits left behind as the tumor shrunk that might be below the threshold of detecting.  So the region of treatment is based on the original bounds of the tumor.

2 of the 3 areas (the third is on the back) where I get radiation.

There are 18 treatments total.  I've had 8 so far.  I guess I'm once again back to counting time by treatments.  I've had 8 so far.  So after tomorrow I'll be halfway done.  My final scheduled day, assuming nothing else goes wrong, is September 25.  That got pushed back a day due to the initial day mishap.

So far I haven't felt any side effects.  I think.  It's hard to say -- I went to yoga today and it didn't go all that well, but maybe that was just how I was feeling today.  There's supposed to be about a 2 week latency before any side effects kick in, and for me that will be in 2 days.  So maybe anything I was feeling today is the beginning of that transition.  Or maybe not.

Possible expected side effects include skin irritation (kind of like a sunburn), throat irritation, and fatigue.  But it's supposed to be in general much less than chemo side effects, so I'm not too worried.  But the latency (both for any side effects starting, as well as stopping after treatment stops), gives me a little anxiety, mostly because I still don't really know exactly what to expect, and that makes planning any other things in life a little difficult.

Nevertheless, while I'm still feeling relatively well (modulo the continuing side effects from all the drugs I had previously, which at this point is mostly some mild insomnia, inability to sleep through the night, continuing hot flashes, still somewhat reduced energy level, and still some mild chemo-brain fuzziness), I'm trying my best to be active and have some fun.  My brother Steve and his family (Laura, Matt, and David) came out from New Jersey a few weeks back.  I made the requisite trip to Muir Woods with the out of towners.  And we all (sans Dylan) had a very good dinner at Chez Panisse downstairs (the fancier, prix fixe, set menu; the more casual, a la carte cafe is upstairs).

Dylan is kind of obsessed with boats right now.  So over Labor Day weekend we took the ferry from Oakland to San Francisco (and back).  He liked it.  While in the city we went to the aquarium at Fisherman's Wharf.  Obviously nowhere near the magnitude of the aquarium in Monterey, but not bad.  And something that until very recently I wasn't even aware of its existence.

This past weekend we took a mini-break out of town, which I think was the first time we've done that since going to Monterey in June.  (Right before chemo side effects got more severe.)  We spent a couple of nights in the Russian River Valley, in Guerneville.  And on Sunday on the way back we spent some time in the Dry Creek Valley.  Both of these are areas of Sonoma County, up in wine country.  The original plan was just going to be a day trip doing some wine touring via bicycle.  But we ended up packing quite a bit into a relatively short amount of time, including canoeing, "swimming" (or at least wading in to the river; and in Dylan's case, also into a public fountain), biking through redwoods, and wine tasting.  Oh yeah, there was also some unexpected strawberry picking, at Preston Vineyards.

Dylan hugs a tree at Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve.

Cheers! Dylan shows off his toasting skills.

With our unplanned bounty of strawberries, I felt compelled to make another pie.  Strawberry/rhubarb.  And while Lorien is fond of the saying that pies are meant to be eaten, and not looked at (I forget where this comes from), I have to say that this one looked pretty good.  As far as the taste, I'm proud to say that while I was at yoga today, Dylan used dessert as an opportunity to speak his first ever three word phrase.  Admittedly it wasn't actually an original thought, and was simply paraphrasing a longer sentence that Lorien had just said to him.  But that's okay, I don't care.  "Best pie world."