River: Final (treatment) Friday

[mdlbear]

This morning I had my final radiation treatment. There's a gong in the waiting room, and I hit it on the way out. Very satisfying. 70 grays spread over 28 zaps, weekdays for five weeks and 3 days.

Radiation dosage is measured in grays, which have the units of energy absorbed per unit mass; one gray is one joule per kilogram. I don't have any kind of informtation about how much my prostate weighed at the beginning of this treatment; possibly around 70g; that works out to about 4.9 joules, spread out over five weeks. According to Wikipedia, one joule is approximately the kinetic energy of a 56g tennis ball moving at 6m/s (22km/h). So one of those every week.

I'm still trying to figure out what would make an appropriate way to mark the transition. By the terminology of these days I've been a survivor since my diagnosis. And I'm still being treated with a testosterone blocker -- I have another year and a half or so of that to go. And it'll be maybe another year after that until I know whether the combination actually got all the cancer. So who, or what, am I now?

An impatient, maybe?

Comments

[acelightning73]

My friend who's an astrophysicist said he's allowed about 1/100 of that per year. My friend who's a nuclear propulsion tech in the Navy said they all wear radiation badges, and you get in trouble if you get more rads than you should. I just knew when I was six that hiding under my desk would not keep me from being incinerated if they nuked NYC. But, yea, cancer isn't the big scary monster we used to think it was; we now know what to do about it.