Hey everyone!
Well to sum it up, this every day after work thing with radiation treatment certainly takes up a lot of time! Thank you for all the texts, Facebook posts and emails with all your support, they mean a lot and help me get through the long days.
Some of you have asked me about radiation and how different it is from chemo, if there are side effects, what goes into it, how my skin is doing, etc. Here’s a bit of what it entails…
Right now I am a little over midway through it. I have 30 treatments, or 6 weeks of radiation. I am finished with week 4 and have 12 treatments left. Two days are added into a 7th week because one day on my first week I had a “dress rehearsal” with no actual radiation and then another night after trekking all the way over there, the treatments that night had to be cancelled because the computer system that “tracks the breath hold” was down herunterladen. They tried to get it back up while we were there, but then it was taking too long so they told all the patients who were left for the night to go home.
So as of right now, by mid-September I will be done with radiation.
At the same time as a couple of my radiation appointments, I also have my antibody infusion at a different Sloan building. It definitely makes for a very long day. The last time I had to do them back to back, I started with the infusion at 2pm to check-in. You have to check in an hour earlier than your appointment time because the pharmacist won’t mix one of the meds until you show up. So already there is an hour built in to wait.
Then my 3pm infusion time was really delayed, so I got into a suite around 5pm. By the time they confirm who I am, find a good vein, get the IV in and another nurse comes in to cross-check that the meds are correct and for me (they are super careful at Sloan which is great) another 20-30 minutes goes by java 7 herunterladen. Then each antibody takes 30 minutes to drip after the nurse switches them out. So there are a lot of variables as to why it takes the time it does. But getting in so late was stressful because I had to be at my radiation appointment a couple blocks away at 6:45pm. And my plan to eat in between appointments went out the window since I didn’t get out of my infusion suite until abut 6:30pm. One definition of irony – when your doctors tell you to keep your stress level down, but then the health facility you’re at to get well is what stresses you out.
Anyway, while I was getting my last infusion, the nurse was smacking at my veins and trying to get one to wake up enough to get an IV in. We were chatting about chemo and the antibodies and I told her i was a little stressed about time since I had to leave as soon as we were done to go over for radiation.
She then said “Well, at least that’s easy.”
I was sort of taken aback by her comment because as she said it I was trying desperately not to scratch my red, irritated itchy chest while simultaneously dreading sitting around in that waiting room and then the trek back through the city before getting on a packed, hot subway ride that would hopefully get me home before 9pm herunterladen.
I replied, “Well, I wouldn’t say it’s easy. For one it’s every single day after work, the table is hard as a rock and cold steel and…”
She cut me off and said, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I just meant that I have had patients tell me it is easy compared to chemo.”
For some, this acquisition de viagra is a very embarrassing situation and why not? Women will not be satisfied and it can put great strain on the relationship of a couple. What you online cialis have to be careful about though is that the site you order from be safe as far as payment gateways are concerned. The medicine is cialis tablets online easy to use as it involves an insertion of a small group of islet cells in the liver citrix workspace app herunterladen. What is the common dosage of kamagra for male impotence? The dosage of Kamagra or kamagra jelly depends on your condition and your health. the best viagra I told her, “It definitely is, yes. Radiation is easier, but it’s not easy.”
I know what she meant, and I tried to make her not feel bad for saying it, which I think she did. Plus, she was holding the IV needle about to poke the only vein that’s been usable in the past few weeks, so I wanted her to concentrate on that and not about saying something stupid to a patient.
But it got me thinking about this whole process. For me, radiation is definitely nowhere near as hard to handle as chemo but it does have its side effects calendar download excel for free. I’m pretty tired now after 4 weeks of running around and the actual radiation that causes fatigue. I go every day after work (some go before) which takes about 30-40 minutes to get there. It entails rushing to the train, waiting for another train if you miss it, then hiking across the city for 20 minutes each way, waiting after checking in – sometimes an hour or two to get seen – putting lotion on 2-4 times a day, going in earlier one day a week for a checkup with my radiation oncologist and forcing myself not to scratch incredibly itchy patches of irritated skin every minute of the day, etc.
And as for the treatment itself, here’s how it works. You check in at the front desk and wait for your name to be called. When it is, you grab a key, go into a small locker room, put your belongings in a locker and change into a hospital gown. You then go into another waiting room until the radiation therapist comes to get you. Then you go into a cold room and get on a hard, steel table. Your arms go up into stirrups and you take down the hospital gown so your breast is exposed to the radiation beams and also whoever the radiation therapists are that night geogebra version 5 herunterladen. I have a team of 4 therapists, but sometimes they have other people covering for them. Some are male, some are female. It’s a hospital setting so you know they have seen it all, but it still takes a little getting used to. They take a Sharpie, mark your tattoo spots a little better and then line you up perfectly on the table where you have to try to remain in position as much as possible. They have you lined up to the millimeter.
The therapist then steps out of the room and talks to you through an intercom, coaching you on the breath technique. If your breast cancer was on your left side, you hold your breath until the radiation stops. This moves your heart out of the way of the radiation beam fritz fon c5 ringtones. They don’t want it to hit anything other than the breast tissue it is targeting. Then the machine moves to another position and you start over again. I do this four times, since they are hitting four different areas. The actual radiation part on the table typically takes about 15-20 minutes most nights. On one random night a week they have to take additional images to make sure you’re still lined up right and everything looks good. So that night is about 40 minutes on the table.
To put it in perspective, one woman I have been sitting around with in the waiting room most nights said she’d take another month of chemo over the grind of daily radiation navi software autoradio sd map. I almost got nauseous just hearing her say that. I wouldn’t go that far – but that should give you an indication of how not easy radiation is.
Over the weekend the concept of what’s easy came up again. I was chatting with one of my best friends from college. She goes for her mammograms regularly and I told her to make sure she also asks for an ultrasound. I didn’t know this before but often mammograms can miss breast cancer, especially in women with dense breast tissue. I know two people now who had clear mammograms, but later on an ultrasound showed a tumor. It is not a one size fits all disease. It comes in all different shapes and sizes, different markers, different treatments needed to kill it, different types of tumors and different levels and stages solitaire download windows 7 kostenlos. So if you are going for your mammogram, fight for an ultrasound too.
She said she does get ultrasounds, but “it’s a pain” because you have to then wait another 20 minutes or more after getting your mammogram, then get the ultrasound and it drags out the appointment that much longer. You probably know where I’m going with this.
As many of you have been following this blog from the beginning, you have seen most of what it takes to fight breast cancer and I’m sure have pretty much gathered at this point that no part of it is easy. That is a big reason why I’m sharing the experience here, to help you understand why it’s so important to get your mammograms and also do your self exams. The earlier you catch something, the easier it is to fight it.
I know women who had a lumpectomy and that’s it. No chemo, no radiation, just medication after download pdf edit. Another friend had a lumpectomy and 4 weeks of radiation. If you catch it at Stage 0 and it hasn’t yet spread you have a lot less work ahead of you. In Stage 0 the “abnormal cells” haven’t left the milk duct, therefore no lymph nodes need to be removed which makes surgery and recovery that much easier. If you remember, I had four nodes removed and one was positive, which moved me into Stage 2 and the fear that cancer cells could have moved into the rest of my body. Another woman I am friendly with now at Sloan had 12 lymph nodes removed and has to do occupational therapy weekly to help straighten her arm all the way. So again, early detection is the key to not just an easier time fighting it, but also a better chance of survival.
So to those of you reading this who have yet to get their mammogram scheduled or don’t want to add an ultrasound or forget to do self exams because you “just don’t have the time” right now or can’t remember to do it…I get it. I was you. I know finding time to sit on hold to make the appointment, getting in the car or on the train to get to the facility, taking the morning or a whole day off from work and possibly missing one of your kid’s events to do it can seem like a major pain in the ass and too time consuming.
But trust me when I tell you, compared to what you have to go through if you let a tumor sit in there to grow – the mammogram/ultrasound part is the only part of this whole process that’s easy.
