Thankful Thursday

[mdlbear]

Today I am grateful for...

• My radiation treatments finally getting started. NO thanks for my digestive system, which appears to be taking lessons from snails and sloths.
• Getting what seems to be pretty accurate timing, based on the second one. Good for planning the rest of my day.
• Ticia. (Bronx is not particularly cuddly. His loss.)
• My support groups. I should try to find a support group for procrastinators. Tomorrow, maybe. Or next week?
• Discovering another song that can make me cry (which may sound weird, but it isn't) -- Janis Ian's "The Last Train".
• (ETA) m for introducing me to Monkey Grind Espresso. Walking distance from home.

Comments

[cornerofmadness]

hope the radiation helps and isn't too awful

[mdlbear]

Thanks! Maybe I need a radiation warning icon?

[cornerofmadness]

ha. I bet you can find a sticker.

[acelightning73]

When I had the hysterectomy, I got five radiation treatments to my whole abdomen every week. They warned me not to eat any nuts, popcorn, cured meats, or anything spicy. Then I made kung pao chicken for dinner. The results were extremely unpleasant - copious, painful, messy, stinky diarrhea, for two days. I basically had radiation sickness. I sincerely hope you don't have anything that unpleasant, just a bit of normal excretion.

[mdlbear]

I normally have slow digestion and extreme constipation, which causes problems because I'm supposed to go into my treatment with an empty rectum (and a full bladder). A single Fleet enema is not always enough. I'm not at the point, three treatments out of 28, where I start to get the diarrhea that's supposedly a common side effect. I wonder whether it will compensate for the constipation.

[acelightning73]

Just be careful what you eat. You might think a few nuts or one slice of bacon won't harm you, but you'll still have to deal with the diarrhea and cramping pain and waves of nausea. It really is radiation sickness. (After my breast cancer surgery, I had more radiation, which led to radiation burns on my skin - skin burns occur most often in folds where skin touches skin. I described it to my friend who's a nuke tech in the Navy - he is never at risk of getting enough rads to affect him that way. And another person I knew who was an astrophysicist working with neutrinos. But modern medicine has figured out how to use a linear accelerator to work miracles.

[mdlbear]

Thanks for the advice. Whenever I see "LINAC" the first thing I think of is SLAC

[acelightning73]

They use a LINAC to produce a beam of high-energy electrons. This bombards a metal target and produces X rays, which they constrain with lead apertures to only affect the target area. (I spent a lot of time geeking out with the rad techs.) It's a bit primitive, but it beats using a gamma emitting isotope. (I got that too - to make sure there was no cancer left in my abdomen, I also got "the iridium dildo", a pellet of the isotope is inserted into a carrier inside my body by a spring-powered device. The tech asked me what kind of background music I wanted. I said "EDM, because it sort of fits with all this scientific equipment." He was pleased; the previous patient had requested gospel music.

And I remember seeing a science program on TV, or maybe reading in a magazine, about how the LINAC worked (and I also now know why they don't use cyclotrons for the purpose.)

[mdlbear]

The version I'm getting is called "Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy" (yours might well have been, too) -- the shielding blocks are moved continuously to contour the beam while the source rotates around you. It makes two passes -- counter-clockwise and clockwise. Presumably that's so they don't have to give the wires more than a half-twist in each direction.

The whole thing is fascinating.

[kshandra]

Ogredude posted a link to this video on the Callahan's Discord a few months back; it's an older version of the module, but it gets the idea across.

[acelightning73]

THe beam head revolved aroud me helically, head to toe then back up. When they were irradiating my breasts, I could see into the beam head and watch metal slats moving into different arrangements. I couldn't quite feel the radiation, but I heard the transformers and the high-voltage switching.