Ticket to Rad...

Although it's Chinese New Year, and the bangs and "fire flowers" are all the rage, I am not going to write about Chinese New Year today. I thought I would take this opportunity to update you all on the progress of my dear wife through her fight against breast cancer.

Well, so far it's looking quite hopeful. She finished her four doses of chemical poisoning back in December, and she is now undergoing radiotherapy. Her shining bald head is now covered with a fuzzy carpet of short black hair, making her look something like a US Marine recruit!

For those of you who have never encountered radiotherapy, it is nowhere near as bad as chemotherapy, but it's still quite scary. It basically involves the patient being directly exposed to rays of radiation for short bursts, usually up to ten minutes at a time. The rays are directed at the area where the cancer was situated, which in Annie's case is the scar tissue where her left breast used to be.

Before the radiation can be administered, there has to be a planning session, where the patient is measured and X-rayed to make sure the body can take the appropriate dosages. This took place back in early January, and took 1 1/2 hours. I wasn't allowed to take any pictures because, as you can imagine, radiation does awful things to your body, especially a man's sexual organs, so you'd better keep away from the stuff unless you are wearing a pair of lead-lined boxer shorts!

However, this is the only really good picture I was able to take:



After the planning session, there was a wait for a week or so and then they called us in for the verdict. Annie was prescribed 25 radiotherapy sessions, which were to be given every day, five days a week, for five weeks. This involves getting up hyper-early in the morning to go to the hospital, wait in their lovely waiting room, and then Annie goes into a science-fiction chamber where she is laid down on a bed, and zapped by a large machine that fires rads at her.

In terms of side effects, there are few. Firstly, it doesn't seem to hurt much, though Annie complains of some skin irritation around the area of her operation scar, and she was told there may be some blistering later. Also, she feels tired and very dry, and her body temperature goes up quite frequently. The body temperature is managed by frequent drinks of coconut juice, which is really good for keeping your temperature down in the tropics.

Also, she comes out of her sessions with her upper chest covered in pen marks and strange squiggles and crosses. These bizarre literacy practices are the result of the radiographers trying to mark out the right spot for the radiation to be aimed at. Also, Annie cannot clean herself with soap in that area, so she goes around with these weird tattoos most of the time, her chest looking like a cave wall festooned by marks left behind by an alien civilisation!

But despite all this, Annie is much happier, because the radiation is not as bad as the chemo. When the rads finish at the end of February, she will be mamogrammed once more to see if the treatment has worked. I am praying and hoping that it has...

As I write this, Annie has had 14 zaps, with 11 to go. Let's keep our fingers crossed, and hope that Annie's "ticket to rad" is her ticket to a full recovery!!