Cancer

Everything you can ever imagine.

Cancer

I have been told just how great it was—and how good of a job I did when it comes to my beating cancer. The truth of the matter is I was simply lucky.

Don’t get me wrong—I was willing to do anything and everything to fight—but many people who fought just as hard just weren’t as lucky. I always told my doctors that I would be happy to double the dose of any medication and treatment—and do if for twice the prescribed time period—if it would give me better odds of beating this sickness.

It has been about six months since the doctors have given me a clean bill of health. This comes after a lot of work from a lot of people—and they all did a great job.

The funny thing is that I remember three odd events during the treatment periods. These events were mini vignettes. The first thing is embarrassing—not because they were poking around in funny ways or anything like that—but funny in the way you see yourself—and then feel ashamed about what you were thinking. It went like this:
One of the things you do very regularly is get your blood taken. Everybody wants some of your blood. It happens so often that you never ever get rid of the bruising from the needles. Most times the nurses do an amazingly great job poking you—but once in a while you get someone who should be in a different line of work. They keep sticking you and not getting to the right place---and you are trying to be and stay calm—but you can’t help but being really tense.

So I am sitting a waiting room waiting for my name to be called and for some reason things are really backed up and it is taking a really long time to get inside. There is this guy and his 2 and 4 year old kids in the waiting room with me. His kids are going crazy. They are running around knocking tables over—making lots of noise—laughing and the dad isn’t paying them any attention at all. All I can think of is what a lousy parent this guy is. I am assuming that he is waiting for someone who is inside getting poked—or perhaps—he is waiting to get poked. This makes me feel a little bad—because if he is waiting to get poked—he probably has a lot on his mind and I should cut him some slack. But I don’t—not really. His kids are really just going nuts.

As it turns out they called us all in at the same time—and I was very surprised to see the phlebotomist (the person who takes your blood) being ever so gentile with the younger of this guys two kids. Turns out that the two year old had leukemia—and was the patient. I didn’t see that coming. The father was so freaked out—about what was going on.  I had imagined that he didn’t know how to discipline his kids. But he was only trying to cope with an unimaginable situation.

The second event was when I was in the “vault” Deep in the basement of the cancer center they have a room dedicated for radiation treatments. They keep everything very clean and tidy and everything is very clean and high-tech. But none the less is is a very strange place. You enter the room through a thick vault door which is lined with lead. Inside the room looks a little bit like a recording studio. The room is very large and at one end of the room there is a very large and thick glass window where all the technologists, physicists, radiologists and oncologists look at the equipment—and control the machines remotely while you are alone in the room.

The process if fairly interesting. Based on your problems and diagnosis’s the team create an electronic three dimensional model of your body on the computer. They design a computer program which makes the gigantic electron particle accelerator beam move in a special way to move in front of you—and around you and in back of you. The table also moves around in the dance. It is actually quite amazing.

Before you ever start the treatments the doctors tattoo you with eight black dots all over your torso. They do this while beaming a test “spray” of electrons on you. This is calibrating you to the machine. By doing this—they can precisely position you each time you come back in perfect registration—so when the machine is turned on it can do it’s job of killing all the cells. The goal is to kill everything good and bad cells alike. They keep beaming these high powered radioactive particle bursts at you over and over, day after day—and week after week in the goal of killing everything in the localized area where you have the cancer. The idea and hope is that only the healthy cells will grow back. The process makes you sick and very tired.

The business end of the gigantic accelerator beam gun is very intense. In reality it is a supper-powered x-ray machine with a magnitude of several million times the power output. Because of the servo motors which control this huge machines movements—it is really something to see in action. I began to wonder what the other end of this monster machine looked like. I only say the part coming out of a clean smooth wall. So one day I asked the technologist who was finishing up with me—what was on the other side of that wall. Nobody had ever asked him before—so he looked kind of funny—but took me through a lead lined passageway door to where the gut of the machine was housed.

The inside of “this” room was a lot different then my treatment room. Here metal panels had been removed from some part of the beams control access panels to reveal circuitry and controllers. Apparently these machines have to be serviced all the time. The scene looked like something like a horror film in the land of the Xerox machines. There were wires and lights everywhere. The difference between those two rooms was unbelievable.

The final event I keep remembering has to do with a woman I would see regularly at my appointments. Generally speaking you have a lot of appointments—and they are regularly scheduled. You start to see familiar faces right away. You know who goes in before you—and who goes in after you.

The process and procedure is always the same with everybody—you are led to the back room just in front of the vault door where they have two dressing rooms side by side. The rooms are basic and the instructions are always the same: you take off all of your street clothes and put on thin flimsy and funky hospital gown.

I had heard that this one woman who was coming in after me wasn’t doing very well. She apparently had to do a lot more therapies then I had to do—and she had several of the procedures repeated over and over. Things weren’t working out well for her. She wasn’t lucky. One day I was in the dressing room on the left side completely naked in the process of changing into or out of clothes. Just then the door swings wide open and the woman who comes in after my treatments who was so sick mistakenly went to the wrong dressing room. She of course was totally mortified that she had disturbed me in some way. I thought that the scene was just so ridiculous and crazy that I had to laugh. I told her that this was the funniest thing that had happened to me in months—and then she started laughing too. It was just plain stupid—but funny. We were just laughing our asses off.

I hope that her luck changed for the better. I just have a bad feeling about it.