Cancer could be so much worse

So remember a few posts ago when I went into detail about the treatment regimen I was on ? Remember the letters GIRCRT? No? "Recalculating..." When I was a teenager I spent hundreds of hours learning how to use a compass and maps or charts to navigate through the woods. Eventually, I learned how to apply the same skills - and even added a few others related to radio navigation - to learn how to navigate as I flew over  the woods. All of that skill is interesting, but it's almost as obsolete as Morse code now. The Global Positioning System - GPS - has supplanted many of these skills, delivering extremely accurate positioning on a variety of maps directly on our cell phones or smart watches. And with the ubiquity of GPS has come another technological wonder that has quietly been inserted into our lives; artificial voices that provide us with instructions. We've all likely encountered this phenomenon when we make a wrong turn and our GPS patiently tells us tha...

I am 80% of the way through my radiation therapy. My regimen  calls for 25 "fractions" of a total dose of  4500 centigrays  of radiation to be given each weekday, and I have just finished day 20. Time for an update! In my last post I mentioned how tired I am after radiotherapy. I wish could say that I'm getting used to radiotherapy - although trust me, I definitely  don't want to get used to it! - but the truth is the exhaustion is, if anything, getting worse. I still feel perfectly fine and normal after my radiotherapy session, and for at least two hours after I still feel pretty good. Then I feel like I'm swimming through oatmeal. The tiredness doesn't come on all at once. It's not like I feel like I was hit by a truck or fell off a metaphorical cliff or anything, but over the space of less than fifteen minutes I go from pretty much perfectly normal to struggling to keep my eyes open. Again, this is a weird sort of exhaustion. My brain is foggy, ...

In my last post  I went into a fair amount of detail about the mechanics of  my radiotherapy. I tried to dispel the notion that my radiation therapy involved radio active  therapy... But how cool would that be? Yeah. That cool. But... actually not really cool. A friend of mine had to undergo radioactive therapy for thyroid cancer just after the birth of one of her children. She was quarantined in a room and couldn't hug or even hold her baby while the radioactivity did its work. So - with all due respect to comic book characters - getting radioactivity sucks. Good thing I'm not getting radioactivity. So... what about the more human side of getting radiotherapy? What's that like? I thought I would take a little time to share some of the downsides of radiotherapy as I see it. Dropping my pants every day of the week I was asked to wear loose-fitting, comfortable clothes for radiotherapy before my first session. The reason stated is that radiotherapy can irr...