Marvin Gaye

         Yesterday I visited my radiation therapy place for a training treatment and met with my radiation oncologist.   It went pretty well overall.  After the 1st waiting room, I get to wait in a secondary waiting area...its got a fish tank, a nice view, beverages, a radio and a jigsaw puzzle to solve. 

        After someone came to get me, they led me to the treatment rooms.  In the first room, there's a control zone, 3 monitors and what looks like a mixing board.  All of my 31 treatments are already entered into the computer.  They let me check that out and then showed me where the action happens. 

    They had me lay on an un-padded plank and gave me a ring, for keeping my hands busy.  At first when they put my mask on, it was very uncomfortable as its very tight and I had pulled a radiation rookie move by leaving my eyes open.  Above where I lay they had one of those cool lights with a happy blue sky scene, in hindsight I'd say that perhaps that's what misled me.

      

      The mask is designed to keep my head and body still so that they can target exactly to the mm of where they want to treat.  That's a good thing, but that also makes it so that if you have your eyes open...well that mask is so tight, you're left unable to close your eyes or blink.  I really like blinking a lot.  The folks there are nice and responsive to my needs, so after I panicked for a moment realizing my mistake, they popped that sucker off me.  I closed my peepers and they put it back on me.  As they were putting it back on, I asked them to explain to me again why the mask is how it is, I knew this would calm me down from the eyelid drama.  Story-time worked and it felt just fine! 

    They were doing some measurements to make sure they had all their ducks in a row.  They took a few x-rays and were lining them up with some CT Scans from last week...and checking things out. The plank moved up and down.  Then they came out and double checked my mask and moved the tape that lines up with the lasers a few mm.  

         

     Then a man's voice, keep in mind that I've got about 4 or 5 different voices talking to me and I cannot open my eyes to know if they're the people I met earlier or a new person, said to me "Do you want to do your first treatment today?". 

      Well, I thought that was a pretty decent question, did I?  I asked the male voice, well, would you?  He said "Its your choice, but I'd probably go today because then I'd be done sooner.".  There's a radio in that room and guess what song was playing, did you guess?  It was "Let's Get It On", by Marvin Gaye.  I figured that song was just about perfect to make my decision to...so I let them know, yes, let's get it on.  

       So we did, nothing too weird happened.  I didn't see any weird lights or have any epiphanies, maybe later on down the line.  I mostly listened to the radio and was impressed when the voice on the speaker overhead said, "okay, we're done, we'll be right out to take off your mask.". 

               1 down, 30 to go.  I've got my next appointment today at 4:36 and I'll be going M-F until my last treatment on May 26th.  Here are a few photos I have from yesterday.  Thanks for reading! xoxoxo, Sara L.

From RadiationTherapy, Day1