Burn, baby burn! (Radio inferno mix, 2017)

 

Hello hello! Are we all enjoying the summer? (Falls over lolling!)

Yes folks, I have completed radiotherapy- and I’m positively glowing. Like, literally. From the inside, out. I might be like a walking microwave (I wish I’d been around in 1912; I could have trailed my big toe in the water from Southampton onwards and averted the unpleasant and untimely death of 1500 passengers including Leo de Bloody Caprio), but it’s all joy, and, it provides a rich source of validated, evidence-based ramblings to prove that this whole treatment lark is choc-full of upsides. For me, at least; I must stress that whatever I say is only medically, and attitudinally accurate for me. I am a bit weird, as you all know.

I’m reflecting with hilarity because I reckon I’ve been like a mobile microwave since January.

The first week of 2017 was MammoFest. I hear it’s going to outsell Glastonbury next year. This is where they squish your Lady Lumps into a vice-like, vehicle-crushing machine (lols aplenty! Ahh, how time embellishes the mammory!) Actually, it’s not that bad, but I shudder to think what it’s like if you have silicone implants (Pop…Pop…Splatttt???).

So they get you captive and then they just bugger off, because the radiation is too dangerous. For them. Not for me, obvs! No, don’t worry about me love, I’m stuck here with my boobs in a vice and you’ve FECd off! Fine! I had 3 of those that day – not a comrade to be found.

What was next? Ahhhh – February – the infamous blue dye injection. This happens within 24 hours ahead of surgery; for me, at 10am on the day of, in a different hospital, with the op due at 1pm. It’s done for the surgeon when she’s busy hoiking the tumour out. The dye provides a visible track of any random cancer cells from the tumour to the lymph nodes in your pits, which the surgeon sees on a screen while she’s hoiking. (I think that’s roughly how it goes).

So anyway, under another radioactive scanning device, a lovely person comes in, sticks a very big needle in your thrupnee bits, then pisses off to a safe zone, presses some buttons, and you’re left there basting away. (By the way, during surgery, what with all that cutting and so on, the dye leeches out to the surface of the breast. I’ve still got blue tits now – and I’m not talking about winged wildlife in my garden).

Oooh… what then. Oh yes! March! The fitting of my PICC line. I must apologise – I’ve never defined this acronym before. It’s a Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter. It’s an intravenous line (a lifeline, in fact) which gets poked in, under local anaesthetic, just by the crook of your elbow. Then it goes up a vein inside the inner arm, across the inside of your chest wall, and down into a chamber near to the heart. So, I’m guessing for me, that’s near enough 2ft of cable- and it’s yours, free, for five months (in my case). There are other ways to receive chemo – but the PICC was considered the best way for my case, my cancer, my physiology. I must say, yet again, I’ve been very lucky; not only can you receive chemo through it, you can also have blood taken from it – effectively removing the need for any arm-based injections, for anything, for a nice lot of ages.

Ok, so back to the matter in arm. Guess what. It’s X-ray again. This gives the PICC fitter (you can’t get quicker than a fit PICC fitter!) a visual guide, on a swivelly screen, to get that lot from my inner elbow to the chamber of, well, dumping of all things cytotoxic.

Here we go again. Having met the (rather nerdy, slash, weirdly interesting ) PICC fitting consultant in his chamber of mirth, we have a quick chat – then before you can say ‘radiation at this frequency could harm your unborn child’ (Ha! Gotcha there didn’t I!), suddenly I’m flat on my back again (you can take the girl out of..), on another consultant’s table – and everyone else in the room appears to have scarpered.

Not for long this time – I’m heartened! Back they troop, all smiles. I smile back. Until I see that they’re all clad in massive lead overalls. My right arm is pinned to the table. (if you’re lucky enough to have breast cancer and lymph node removal in just one side, like moi, your PICC needs to go in the opposite arm).

The room was at a hush. I pipe up: “um, hello, what about meeeee??? I think I’d be a Medium if you have any spare overalls?? …. please???”

Nerdy weirdy geeky’s tableside manner has vanished.

“I’m about to insert your PICC line, and I have a screen here which will guide me. You can watch as well if you want to?”

My sense of humour, by then, was on a one way ticket to chemosville. Which, I may add, was a FEC load more fun compared to that part of this never-ending process I’ve been scampering through.

Then, after chemo, I get a radiotherapy planning CT scan. Yes – the amazing adventure inside a giant polo mint. It’s done to build an internal map of my chesticles, which they’ll need for alignment during radio treatment. My arms are put into grippy things above my head; a snorkel type thing gets shoved into my mouth because I need to hold my breath while I’m in the polo; and we’re near enough ready.

Oh – except for one small detail. I’m about to get not one, but three tattoos!! Jeez Louise – 50 years untatted, and I come from Somerset, and now I get three and I can’t even choose the design. (I’d have gone for F..E..C, obvs.)

People who haven’t been through this process scoffed a bit when I told them. ‘Hahaha – but it’s not really a tattoo is it, just a marker pen.’ Nope! It’s a buzzing electric needle people, with actual greeny-blue ink in it; it bloody hurts, and you end up with three dots on your boob area afterwards. I saw a friend a week or so ago and she showed me hers which she’d got given 20 years ago. Again, if you’ve not had this lark, I don’t think it’s helpful to the patient if you express your assumption that you know more than the person having it …us cancoids do tend to know what’s going on with us 🙂

Anyway, once I’m all rigged up and pinned down, off they FEC! Into a room with a big window where they can press buttons and watch me fry. Cheers girls! Lovely to have met you!

Next stop – radiotherapy. Where chemo was measured in cycles, radio is measured in fractions. Great – exercise and maths – two things I am absolutely useless at.

I’m fully signed up for 19 squirts of radiotherapy. That’s 15 to the whole chest area, and the final four described as a ‘turbo boost’ to the tumour bed on the left. These happen every working day, over four weeks (you get weekends off for good behaviour. Amazingly, I did. Read on!).

Because Terry the tumour was a leftie, on the chestie, and that’s also where your heart lives, I have to have my radiotherapy squirts (ok….’fractions’ ; the consultant wasn’t overly impressed with my homemade nomenclature), while holding my breath. Why, I wondered?

There’s an official name for it but baaaasically, if you hold your breath, it inflates the lungs, pushes out the chest wall, and those things reduce the risk of the targeted radiation zapping your heart in the process. I mean, nobody really wants that, after all this, do they?? I get it. But can I do it??

It’s made both easier, and more difficult, by the fact that along with the thing shoved in your mouth, you also get to see what the radiologists see on their screens once they’ve set you up and legged it to safety in a different room, of course. This is why I’ve attached a picture (above) because I’d exceed my word count if I tried to explain it just through this, and you’d be asleep.

Right, as you can see, I’m there with my arms up in a personalised holding position. I’ve got my new favourite shoes on, obvs. We planned all this at the CT session (not the shoes) and it’s all pre-loaded on the computer. My Malbec delivery system is firmly implanted in my mouth. And look – is that me sunbathing with those glasses on? Think I’m slacking??! Bear with me.

Through those specs, I see the screen which the team see (IN ANOTHER ROOM I might add – those girls look happy because they’re just off to safety!). I have a resting breathing target to meet (shown as a wiggly red line along a horizontal bar on the bottom of the screen). I have to breathe normally, via snorkel and mouth, not nose, to hit the middle of the bar. For a while. Then – excitement! A green traffic light goes on – and with it, another horizontal bar appears at the top of the screen. That’s the cue for me to inhale through my mouth, hit the middle of that bar, and hold it there, for 40 seconds. A red traffic light comes on the screen, and everything inside me exhales. Noisily. Awks. I do this three times.

Now, see those panelly things and that lumpy round bit either side and above me? The minute the girls go, those bits start whizzing all over me – closer, further away – it’s like some Jane Austen-penned dance routine as they approach, retreat, turn around and change.

Anyway, my appointment is 20 minutes. Most of that is the set up – those tatts I had were for a reason, as they line up with the green laser lights that you can see to ensure that the zapping goes exactly where it’s meant to. That takes time; and two professionals who check, record, cross check, shouting lots of numbers to each other to make absolutely sure – and then get an Uber to the safe zone.

Sorry that’s taken so long – and also, if you knew all this already.

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Now, I’m not a competitive person, as far as competing with others is concerned. It happens at work, and in life – you see people crawling all over their friends, grandparents’ and children’s heads, right up the very backsides of the person they need to impress, dropping lies en route, just to feather their own nests. This stuff leaves me cold – I just can’t be arsed. But I am hugely competitive with myself – in that, I just want to improve on things the next time I do them, whatever they may be. And only at my own expense: therein lies the difference, I think.

I have the first radio appointment of the day – I asked for that slot, daily over 19 days, just so as it’s done and dusted, and I can compete with myself to drive back quicker than I did the day before to the garden, to complete more weeding than I did yesterday, before conk-out time, which is still around 1pm. But could I make that 1.15pm the day after?? (It’s quite tiring, being me.)

So after a few days of this lark, sat in the holding area with other patients, due after me, with varying degrees of mobility, I start thinking. I can nail this. I must be able to get in and out in under 20 minutes. Then, the team can start their day ahead of schedule, and I can weed til my heart’s content until I need to go splat.

Voices in your head aren’t great, but they are compelling. For me, the sense of potential achievement as I chug along the treatment conveyor belt, has been critical. I’ll go into that another time.

So – back to the daily zapping.

(Interesting: the consent form for radiotherapy listed potential side effects as heart disease, lung disease, other cancers – particularly melanoma – skin blistering and fatigue. I only bothered looking at the last one, and signed as enthusiastically, but a little more tired, than the chemo one. Bring it on! I must stress, the listed side effects only apply to me and my case).

So – all seems straightforward. I am in the waiting room. It’s day 4 of 19. I’ve got the general gist of what goes on – what I need to do with the breath hold lark, the fact I have to rely on myself to do it properly, the need I have to get back to the weeding. I’m formulating a plan. I can save time here, I know it.

For a start, I’m quite mobile. Not so the lady after me, who comes into reception in a wheelchair. For second, I have to strip to the waist for my treatment – so I can plan what I wear to make sure that’s quick to get off. Gone are those Laura Ghastly high-necked frocks which so bedecked my wardrobe before (pah! As if!) – I need release-me-quick attire. Plus I really need to focus on what I have been asked to do. It’s no good lying on the rack thinking of what you need in Tesco- you’ve got to give it your all.

I set myself a target, just to do it quicker today than I did it yesterday.

First job: when you’re called for your turn, you can see the nurse approaching along the corridor towards the glass doors she’ll go through to call you in.

Time to get my top off. I must admit, it took a while for the other patients in the waiting room to get used to this.

Next: get on the rack. Fine – they leave a modesty sheet (blue hospital paper stuff) behind a screen type thing for me. Sod that – I’ve already walked half a mile with my nellies out – no need for that in here, think I!

Then: get on the rack, put your arms up, get something big shoved in your mouth (stop it SG!); and away they all merrily go to safety while toxic radiation permeates my boobs and my soul. No, actually, not my soul! Just my boobs! (I just heard a snippet of the Verve while I wrote that!!! – it was a bitter-sweet symphony).

Right – next thing – I can absolutely do these breath holds properly – or, better than yesterday. If I don’t hit the right point on the resting breathing graph, consistently, I don’t get the cue to hit the breath hold graph – and if I don’t get either right, I won’t get the radiation. I’m understanding my bazongas need the radiation.

Suffice to say, within 5 days, I’d broken all known previous records and got my treatment time down from 20 to 4.5 minutes. Like I say, it’s very tiring being me.

Next stop is a bone density scan. Now…people have this for all sorts of reasons…and maybe, they haven’t spent the last 19 days being in Star Trek territory. I don’t know. But for whatever reason, I absolutely p’d myself laughing at……..this: (Top pic – I can’t work out how to get them in the right spot 😂😂)

I’m like, ‘WTF is this? An overhead projector? Call yourself a radioactive scanner???’ Pahh!!

Well, as you can imagine, this was quite a relief. No nakedness, no breath hold – just in, under, out. And! My carer got to stay with me all the way through ❤ I had this done because the endocrine (drug) therapy I have started can, and does, cause osteoporosis. So they take a baseline of your bones to see where you are at the start.

Other side effects of that drug? Hair loss, weight gain. Happy days! Ten years of that – it’s just too funny. Honestly- it’s just so funny! I honestly do not give a flying FEC, apart from the fact it’ll be hard to spin this blog out for ten years with exciting news of how I took a tablet. Or will it?? ….

So where I am I now? Well, my whole left chesticle (yes, including the nipp itself) is peeling – I got very badly burned from radiotherapy. I’ve lovely scabs and blisters all over my boobolas which double helpfully as crunchy nibbles should friends pop in of an evening.

Funny how we haven’t seen anyone for a while!

This treatment made me more tired than I’d allowed for. I can’t work out if that was because it was every day, and off the back of chemo, or because it does make you tired. I’m still tired – apparently this bit goes on for a while. We’ll just go with the flow, as ever.

I’m still cooking inside like a good’un – radiotherapy keeps doing its work for at least 6 weeks after your last treatment, my Onc says. So if you want your windscreen defrosting, your coffee warming up, your feet toasting, relationships with your in-laws melting – I can help!

I’m your own, personal radioactive girl. Very warm thoughts, to you all xxx

 

 

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