"When you're ready, take a deep breath ... and hold it." I heard those instructions over a loud speaker during my first of 30 radiation treatments today — about 20 times. Why? It's what I have to do to get my heart as far out of the way of the "radiation field" as possible.
Radiation is serious stuff, people. They don't want it messing with my ticker. Some women are built differently and don't have to monkey with this breath-holding business. Not me. Before each dose of radiation, I'll have to take in a great big breath, hold it, think about how nice it is that I'm not drowning or anything imminently life-threatening, then let it out and wait to do it all over again. I'm making it sound like bummer. It's not, really. OK, it is a little bit. I'd been crossing my fingers and toes that I'd be able to do it the "easy way." When I asked my mom if she had to do the breath-hold thing when she was kicking cancer, she said a) "No." and b) "What do you mean 'breath-hold thing'?" Turns out it's a relatively new technique — one that wasn't offered as an option when she was treated for breast cancer almost four years ago now. All right, all right. I'm getting over it. I'm embracing this for what it is: progress. So here I am. One treatment down, 29 to go. Once a day Monday through Friday. I'll wrap up early March.
Today's session took almost an hour, longer than the rest of them will. My treatment team had to make double, triple, quadruple check that all the calculations in my treatment plan were spot on. They took X-rays from four different angles and compared them to scans taken a couple weeks ago when they mapped everything out. They made a few adjustments before giving me four doses of radiation via a space-age machine that rotated around me.
Here's where I'm getting radiated:
Most of my left chest, where my ex-breast and two tumors used to be.
My underarm about halfway down my ribcage, where I had all eight lymph nodes removed, six of them cancerous.
The area above my left collarbone, the hub of lymph nodes that's closest to knot of my formerly cancerous lymph nodes. There's no sign of cancer there. They're zapping this area because if my cancerous lymph nodes drained any cancer anywhere, they'd have drained it here.
The main side effects I’m told to expect are:
Sunburn-like situation on the skin where I’m getting zapped, hopefully not bad and only in the final few weeks. Will my super sensitive skin, which has gotten sunburned through clothes before, crack or blister? Let's hope not. My mom’s given me some goat milk cream that worked wonders for her. She only got a mild burn during the final week of her radiation therapy.
Fatigue, since my body will be working hard to repair the tissues that are getting radiated.
Some bummers/anxiety inducers:
I’ll likely have to quit swimming for a while, since chlorine can irritate and dry out healthy skin and wreak havoc to unhealthy skin.
There’s no way to spare the tip of my left lung from radiation it doesn’t need, so I’ll get a “lungburn” that will heal eventually but remain somewhat scarred. If I get a CT scan when I’m 70, whoever gets the first look at it might say, “Well, lookie here. You got radiation awhile back, didn’tchya?”
Radiation increases my risk of lymphedema (serious arm swellage).
Because I’m young, I run a higher-than-average risk that radiation will give me – wait for it – CANCER! All I can do with this one is laugh and dismiss. I'm just gonna choose to believe that the risk of such a stupidly cruel irony is stupidly low.
In other news ... my hair's starting to grow back! We call it my "chickie fuzz." I'm not ready to retire my hat collection yet. I'm gonna wait until there are more hairs per square inch than scalp.