Radiation Was Not What I Had Expected

I think I had a whole lot of ideas in my mind about what radiation treatment would be and I think for the most part I was pretty far off. You can have all kinds of side effects. Some people have worse effects from that than the chemo. Luckily I was not one of those. I really don't remember feeling much if any side effects. I was already tired so I don't know if radiation made it worse. I didn't really get a sore throat like they completely expected me to. I didn't get a burn like a sunburn in the radiated area. So I think all in all I was pretty lucky as far as that goes. Radiation started December 3 2007 I believe. I had just delivered Gabriella on the 17th of November.

My first appointment took the longest. I had to go in and get scans, measurements, adjustments. It's amazing how even a slight movement affects the radiation. They would quite literally poke me to the left or right with a finger so softly you wouldn't believe they'd moved you at all. I had to lie down on the table that you get your radiation on but I lied down on this crinkly white almost Floam type of material. Do you know what Floam is? Well it reminded me of that. Then I have no idea how but all the sudden this stuff started tightening around me. My arms, head, sides, etc. Pretty soon they had a hard solid mold of my body. Each day when I got my radiation I would like down in this mold to make sure I was always in the same position. They'd still roll me this way and that way but I had to lie in that mold. The radiation machine was large. It was open. There was this huge arm that came out over my head. They inserted this huge heavy looking Plexiglas type of thing. It was big, square with random drilled holes. It looked like something a kid could do. They slid that thing into the machine and then would leave the room. The lights would go down, the machine made a very very faint buzzing noise. It would do this for a minute or 2, click a few times then buzz again. All in all maybe 5 minutes tops. That was it. I was done. It felt like nothing had even been done.

I had to do that 17 times. Like I said, I had no side effects at all from it that I know of. Not everyone is guaranteed to be that way but this was just my own little personal experience. I don't state any of it in a professional medical point of view but just your average person point of view. I didn't mind it honestly. I got to know the people there and they seemed genuinely happy to see me when I came in. I made them all cookies for Christmas. At my last treatment we all said with a chuckle, that we hoped to never see each other again.