I'm now on my second week of radiation, out of a total of six weeks. It hasn't been too bad so far. The worst part is probably having to wear the pump all day, every day for six weeks. The pump is a VHS-tape-sized contraption that I wear in a fanny pack in front of me, and continuously pumps chemo (5-FU, to be precise) into the port-a-cath in my chest through a needle. The housing of the needle sticks up about an inch off my chest, and occasionally gets caught on things like seatbelts, but most of all makes it difficult to sleep. Also, the front of my left shoulder gets sore whenever my port is "accessed" (i.e. has a needle in it), which makes things like walking the dogs hard.
I was initially deeply apprehensive about having the pump 24/7 for six weeks, because it's the same pump and the same drug that I went home with after my regular chemo treatments, and I associated it so strongly with feeling absolutely miserable. Luckily, it turns out that the drug that really made me miserable is a different part of the cocktail, and 5-FU by itself isn't so bad. The main side effect is diarrhea, but, at least for now, immodium is sufficient to handle it.
The radiation treatment itself is entirely painless. I show up, change into hospital gowns, and eventually get called into the room where they scan my ID card to make sure they're giving the right radiation to the right patient. The first step is climbing up onto the table, which has a special cutout for my belly, so that my small intestines will fall down into the cutout and be further from the radiation field (apparently ovaries and small intestines are particularly vulnerable to radiation). Once I'm on the table, they turn on the laser cross-hairs and line my blue dot tattoos up with the laser marks, primarily by tugging on a sheet underneath me to move me where they need me to go. Then the techs head out, an alarm buzzer sounds, and I get a few seconds of radiation. I'm getting radiation in four fields, one from on top of me, one below me, and one on each side. Each field has a different lead wedge that needs to be inserted into the machine to balance the radiation dose, so the techs come in and out as the four different fields are radiated. Every Monday, they take a set of x-rays to make sure I'm still in the correct position. On non-x-ray days, I'm in the room for a total of around 8 minutes; x-ray days are slightly longer, but are still right around 10 minutes. By far the most time-consuming aspect is getting to and from the hospital in Boston traffic.
Tomorrow morning, very early, Greg will detach me from my pump so that I can really shower! You can't get the dressing over the port/needle wet, which makes showering difficult. We bought a hand-held shower head to replace our existing one, and tried the saran-wrap-and-tape approach that had been recommended by my nurse with reasonable success. I have to hang the pump (in a bag) on a hook outside the shower, and the tubing isn't all that long, so range of movement became a real issue. But overall it worked better than expected.
I get to take off the pump tomorrow morning because I have my weekly medical oncology appointment at 8 and my infusion appointment to get my new 7 day pump at 9. So it's okay if I'm off the pump for the few hours it takes me to shower, get to the hospital, meet with doctors and then get hooked up again.
October 7th (hopefully my last day of radiation treatment) cannot come soon enough!!
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