so this is what I am really calling the second week of treatment. July 22-28. the first full week of treating my cancer.
Lets take a moment to recap and clarify:
May 23 Biopsied for cancerous cells-July23, confirmed 1 week later July 30.
July 23 2 months of confirming/consulting/poking/prodding/scheduling.
Ok, wanted to get that out of my system before a pissed off just one more time, the process is as slow me writing this blog! I've got drugs to blame for my speed of writing ( sucks when you are mid word and you just dose off for 6-7 minutes), The big question is, what are the excuses all of those other professionals have with there lost time!?! Another statistic? Just another finger pointing at yet another bad health care / business model basic? It's going to be a long summer. Just getting through this one post is going to be tuff.
So the day to day stuff, go back to the scheduling post. That is what Kim's and my life revolve around
and will revolve around for 7+ weeks. It has ebbs and flows but it will be our lives between the hours of 7am-6pm.
So I go into my TOMO radiation room and the Tomo Nymphs are waiting for me. Go in, put in my dental plates, and was told to lie down before the Radiation Overlord TOMO. I lay down and the 2 spritely Tomo Techs both drag my mask over and say you ok to put the mask on? Yup, and down it comes. And as it get's closer, they start locking the bitch down to the table and I start getting a little cluastrophobic and they say help out by wiggling your face around and touch until it fits and i cant breath its smushing my nose and cant see out because Im to close to the mask to get any thing for the brain to focus on and the last mask lock goes down and the tech says ok and I still cant breathe and start flailling my arms around and point to my nose and they quickly unlock the mask and lift it off my face and one of the girls says "Ok, that went pretty good for your first time" They give me a moment to catch my breath and mentally retrace what just went down. I take about a minute breathing, mentally think I got the process down and say OK, lets give her another try. This time much smoother and since I figured out the face positioning thing out, the mask went on, locked down, was I was breathing. Check. Ok here we go say's the other tech and I start to move into the machine.
Like a very surreal Disney ride you glide into the thing and for five minutes it hums along figuring out todays position my mask is in and adjusts the radiation burst to match up to todays alignment. then we glide back out to set up for radiation. Between just being able to see a little and using sense of hearing and motion the most, I am building a mental movie of what it being done physically to me. So Im laying there listening and not moving cause I'm locked down to basically a 2"x 24" black board and I begin hearing this weird clicking/clacking sound coming from behind my bed, a weird old worldly clockworks sound yet cybernetic in operation, like a Jules Verne meets Gene Roddenberry kind of clicking. Then it stops. What was that sound for. I almost figure it out and then I start to move back into the machine. This time it's quiet. No gentle whirring. Just the hum of a machine that's turned on all around you. And in that silence I figure out what the clicking sounds were.
It was collimator's aligning themselves to the start position in the TOMO machine.
And with that term an explanation of what the collimator do/are for those non tech types.
The picture on the top depicts me, the handsome and debonair grey vertical stick being blasted with radiation. Notice that radiation without collimators tend to shoot radiation beams everywhere and are sort of out of control and radiating any thing in site like the old style therapies. Oh the Humanity!!
OK, Tomo is a bit more advanced than that. Tomo's radiation generator rotates around my body 360º.
Somewhere between the Tomo Radiation Generator (let's call it RadGen) and me ( the handsome and debonair vertical grey stick), lie hundreds of little computer controlled collimators. As RedGen makes it's 15 minute journey around my body, the bizarre clicking is the sound of these crazy little things resenting themselves for the next drive by shooting of my neck by RenGen. And because its going 360º, so do all the sounds so when I'm inside the machine the sonds circle around my head in super surround sound so the whole thing is like my own personal bad 3D SciFi movie in my head. And after 15 minute the Tomo Nimphs come out, break the seal, and I am free to fly out into the world. Until the next appointment. But that's Tomo, twice a day, 6 hours apart, 5 days a week for 7+ weeks. So that's about the week. End of week comes, Kim and I have the weekend off, it's early enough in the treatments that my reactions a small indigestion and some foods are starting to taste a little different.
There's a Renesence Festival going on in Kenosha and it's also Taste of Wisconsin in Kenosha right next to Lake Michigan this weekend as well. We had a lot of fun because it was probably the last full weekend we got
Lets take a moment to recap and clarify:
May 23 Biopsied for cancerous cells-July23, confirmed 1 week later July 30.
July 23 2 months of confirming/consulting/poking/prodding/scheduling.
Ok, wanted to get that out of my system before a pissed off just one more time, the process is as slow me writing this blog! I've got drugs to blame for my speed of writing ( sucks when you are mid word and you just dose off for 6-7 minutes), The big question is, what are the excuses all of those other professionals have with there lost time!?! Another statistic? Just another finger pointing at yet another bad health care / business model basic? It's going to be a long summer. Just getting through this one post is going to be tuff.
So the day to day stuff, go back to the scheduling post. That is what Kim's and my life revolve around
and will revolve around for 7+ weeks. It has ebbs and flows but it will be our lives between the hours of 7am-6pm.
So I go into my TOMO radiation room and the Tomo Nymphs are waiting for me. Go in, put in my dental plates, and was told to lie down before the Radiation Overlord TOMO. I lay down and the 2 spritely Tomo Techs both drag my mask over and say you ok to put the mask on? Yup, and down it comes. And as it get's closer, they start locking the bitch down to the table and I start getting a little cluastrophobic and they say help out by wiggling your face around and touch until it fits and i cant breath its smushing my nose and cant see out because Im to close to the mask to get any thing for the brain to focus on and the last mask lock goes down and the tech says ok and I still cant breathe and start flailling my arms around and point to my nose and they quickly unlock the mask and lift it off my face and one of the girls says "Ok, that went pretty good for your first time" They give me a moment to catch my breath and mentally retrace what just went down. I take about a minute breathing, mentally think I got the process down and say OK, lets give her another try. This time much smoother and since I figured out the face positioning thing out, the mask went on, locked down, was I was breathing. Check. Ok here we go say's the other tech and I start to move into the machine.
Like a very surreal Disney ride you glide into the thing and for five minutes it hums along figuring out todays position my mask is in and adjusts the radiation burst to match up to todays alignment. then we glide back out to set up for radiation. Between just being able to see a little and using sense of hearing and motion the most, I am building a mental movie of what it being done physically to me. So Im laying there listening and not moving cause I'm locked down to basically a 2"x 24" black board and I begin hearing this weird clicking/clacking sound coming from behind my bed, a weird old worldly clockworks sound yet cybernetic in operation, like a Jules Verne meets Gene Roddenberry kind of clicking. Then it stops. What was that sound for. I almost figure it out and then I start to move back into the machine. This time it's quiet. No gentle whirring. Just the hum of a machine that's turned on all around you. And in that silence I figure out what the clicking sounds were.
It was collimator's aligning themselves to the start position in the TOMO machine.
And with that term an explanation of what the collimator do/are for those non tech types.
The picture on the top depicts me, the handsome and debonair grey vertical stick being blasted with radiation. Notice that radiation without collimators tend to shoot radiation beams everywhere and are sort of out of control and radiating any thing in site like the old style therapies. Oh the Humanity!!
Now when we use collimators, radiation is controlled allowing only beams to pass threw
the openings. We control the vertical, we control the horizontal, kind of like the Twilight Zone
except in a good way.
Somewhere between the Tomo Radiation Generator (let's call it RadGen) and me ( the handsome and debonair vertical grey stick), lie hundreds of little computer controlled collimators. As RedGen makes it's 15 minute journey around my body, the bizarre clicking is the sound of these crazy little things resenting themselves for the next drive by shooting of my neck by RenGen. And because its going 360º, so do all the sounds so when I'm inside the machine the sonds circle around my head in super surround sound so the whole thing is like my own personal bad 3D SciFi movie in my head. And after 15 minute the Tomo Nimphs come out, break the seal, and I am free to fly out into the world. Until the next appointment. But that's Tomo, twice a day, 6 hours apart, 5 days a week for 7+ weeks. So that's about the week. End of week comes, Kim and I have the weekend off, it's early enough in the treatments that my reactions a small indigestion and some foods are starting to taste a little different.
There's a Renesence Festival going on in Kenosha and it's also Taste of Wisconsin in Kenosha right next to Lake Michigan this weekend as well. We had a lot of fun because it was probably the last full weekend we got
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