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

Hurrah

[dialecticdreamer]

I hope that it works for you. The treatments get better every year, it seems, but that doesn't alleviate much of the mental and emotional toll.

Take time to think about how to mark this success, though. You've earned it!

Re: Hurrah

[mdlbear]

Thanks. I have a few ideas.