Spiritual Slide Shows

I don’t have to do any more radiation therapy appointments, hence I’ve graduated from radiation treatments and I have the diploma to prove it:

It sort of sounds cool, but really all it means is I did what I was told to do. I’ve not much work to do yet since returning to my job part time so I’d thought I’d add to the blog and talk about radiation therapy. There was great consultation about what the experience would be like, and for the most part it was true. One of the missing parts was the percieved tiredness or fatigue. Thankfully it never manifested itself all the time. Only a couple of days did I feel the need to sleep after a treatment or later on in the afternoon. However, one of the side effects that has come true is hair loss. I’ll post a picture of my really bad haircut soon, but on a positive note, my radio-oncologist told me that rogaine (actually minoxodil) works well for radiation hair loss. So I now rogaine my bald spots twice a day. He said this merely jumpstarts the natural re-growth that would normally occur 2-3 months out from the treatment in my case.

Other than that, all I had to do was travel to the hospital every weekday, check in and wait for them to call my name. Then I would lie on the gantry table, and they would put my radiation mask on. All that’s required to do is keep my head in place so I get the exact same treatment every time. Here’s a few pictures of what it was like my last day:

And of course when you are all strapped in, you can’t get yourself out. So what do the techs do on my last day? They take my camera and start taking pictures of random things…everything except for themselves of course.

Goofballs…geez!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 3:24 pm and is filed under General, Photos, Serious. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.