Today is Thursday and I’ve had 8 radiation treatments so far. Monday this week (treatment #5) I noticed that my incision from the lumpectomy has turned light pink. Today I asked about what kind of lotion I can use on my pink spot and I was told to buy the Nivia brand with aloe. If I can break away to get to the grocery store soon I’m going to hunt for it. With Kelric’s early bed time and our general exhaustion after working a full day and then playing with the baby, it’s hard to get to the store.
Monday I asked during treatment why they put a shield of some kind over the x-ray machine. The technician told me it evens out the radiation for my body. Part of my body is thicker and part is thinner. The shield is thicker on the side where my body is thinner and the shield is thinner on the side my body is thicker. That way they don’t overtreat the thinner bits to get sufficient radiation to the thicker bits. Oh.
Tuesday they took a chest x-ray. Wednesday they took another x-ray. What’s that for? The doctor made an adjustment of half a centimeter in the positioning of the radiation and the second x-ray was to document the change.
I asked Wednesday what the x-rays show. The nurse put up a collection of CT scan images (4 images on one x-ray sheet) and Tuesday’s x-ray side by side. She showed me where the radiologist had marked the area where the radiation treatments are supposed to hit my body. I recognized the treatment pattern overlaid on my CT images as the shape of the “leaves” behind the glass on the gantry machine. Oh. Then she showed me from the x-ray where the radiation is actually hitting my body at the original setting. She compared it to where the doctor/computer-generated image showed it was supposed to hit my body. Slight variation. Then she put up that most recent x-ray with the half centimeter adjustment made. She showed me the slight difference where it is affecting a smidgen more of my breastbone than before. OK. That was neat, and I thanked her for taking the time to explain things to me. I’m glad I asked.
Today I asked how many rads I’m getting with each treatment. The answer: 180. That doesn’t seem so bad. From “Dr. Love’s Breast Book” I expected 4500 to 5000 rads per treatment. I felt very comforted hearing that my treatments only contain 180 rads. Then again, 33 treatments times 180 rads each equal 5940 rads. That disturbs me because I think radiation is cumulative. I know that a modern x-ray is just a fraction of a rad.
Here’s a quote from a link http://www.cancer.org/docroot/CRI/content/CRI_2_4_3X_Can_breast_cancer_be_found_early_5.asp to the American Cancer Society web site. “To put dose into perspective, if a woman with breast cancer is treated with radiation, she will receive around 5,000 rads (a rad is a measure of radiation dose). If she had yearly mammograms beginning at age 40 and continuing until she was 90, she will have received 20 to 40 rads. As another example, one mammogram exposes a woman to roughly the same amount of radiation as flying from New York to California on a commercial jet.” I didn’t know you got dosed with small amounts of radiation from flying on planes! That’s interesting.
What is a rad, exactly? According to this web site http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nuclear/radrisk.html#c5, “The rad is a unit of absorbed radiation dose in terms of the energy actually deposited in the tissue. The rad is defined as an absorbed dose of 0.01 joules of energy per kilogram of tissue. The more recent SI unit is the gray, which is defined as 1 joule of deposited energy per kilogram of tissue.” I believe “SI” stands for “Standard International.” So the “rad” is the old unit of measurement and the “gray” is the new unit of measurement and 100 rads equal 1 gray. And I thought “gray” was just a color involving black and white. It must involve pink as well.
I still have loads of energy and I only get depressed when I notice how few eyebrow hairs I have left. The “baby” eyebrows are growing in, but the continued hair loss marks another thing that’s beyond my control (and, let’s face it, I’m something of a control freak) so it’s mildly traumatic and bugs me continually. It also confuses me to still be losing any type of hair when it’s growing back all over. What’s especially annoying is that the stupid eyebrow hairs hurt when they’re ready to fall out. So one or more hairs die, they hurt, I rub my eyebrows and see the hair or hairs on my finger. I sigh then go back to whatever I was doing. Another day or two and it’ll be over. Meanwhile, my face looks funny.
On the other hand, the back of my head feels like velvet. It’s really neat. The front top of my head feels like velvet, too, only a shorter pile. The middle top of my head feels bumpy as all the little hair follicles are trying to push through the skin. The hair is growing back in the order it fell out with the earliest fallout areas coming back first. We still can’t tell for sure what color it is. In some light sources the color looks pale blond, in others it looks strawberry blond, and in others it looks a little dark. Right now Kelric’s baby fine hair is about an inch long so he’s way ahead of me. I’m getting more comfortable with my super short hair and when I feel too hot I’ll take my head scarf off at work. I tried wearing my wig today but it made my scalp itch too much. The scarf is soft and comfortable so I like it better than the wig. One of my coworkers has promised to loan me his scarf with red chili peppers on it. I hope he brings it soon so I can wear it and be sassy.
The other day Guy and I were somewhere that I found to be cold and he didn’t. It’s a common situation, I’ve noticed. This time he checked my forearm for goose bumps to see how cold I really was. I looked at my forearm, too. “Look,” I told him, “both of my hairs are standing up.” All the little baby hairs were at attention but they’re so short they always look that way. The two remaining original hairs on my arm were both indeed standing up. I wasn’t exaggerating, but it was an injection of humor that made Guy laugh. I forgot all about being cold as I laughed with him.
Eeee-gads! The quick note I started to write just after 10:15 has turned into another long one. It’s after 11 p.m. and I’m going to pay for this tomorrow. I could blame tomorrow’s fatigue on the radiation but now I have all of you witnesses to keep me straight. Guy was smart. He fell asleep on the sofa just after 9 p.m. tonight.
‘Night, ya’ll,
Angela
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