Radiation beams, video games, and sweater defuzzers....

Four days into radiation and, all things considered, the treatment itself hasn't been too bad.  I am incredibly tired, but that's to be expected both from the treatment itself and the daily drive to and from the Med Center.  I thought was feeling well enough to go to yoga earlier in the week, but have been having pretty significant hip pain since then.  There doesn't seem to be any serious damage, the doctor just thinks I over-did it a bit.  (Who, me?) He said that "gentle range of motion" exercises were OK.  I said "I thought that's what I was doing?"  Ok, lesson learned.
 

My husband was explaining to our boys that I had to go for "radiation therapy" every day.  My youngest got a confused look on his face and asked "are they going to nuke her?"  Ahhhhh....the joy of having boys.   He explained that it was similar to their video games, but a little different.
 

Unlike chemotherapy, which exposes the whole body to cancer-fighting drugs, radiation therapy is aimed at only the part of the body being treated.  In my case, that's my hip.  Radiation therapy "beams" a high dose of radiation to the cancer cells.  (Much like my son was envisioning in his video games.) The radiation damages the genetic material within the cancer cells,  limits their ability to reproduce, and causes them to die. Normal cells are also affected by radiation, but they are typically able to repair themselves and recover.  Spreading the radiation treatment out over several smaller treatments allows the normal cells to recover.  In my case, I will have ten treatments.

 

I lay down on a treatment table and the therapists line the laser beams from the machine with the tattoos they placed on my hips last week.  The machine zaps me once from above, rotates around me, and zaps me once from behind.   I'm only in the treatment room for about ten minutes.  The room itself looks like something out of a sci-fi movie and the machine looks intimidating.  I took this picture after today's treatment....

 

Like I said, the machine looks intimidating, well, at least it did until I realized that it looks like one of those battery-operated sweater defuzzers.  You can't tell me that you don't see the resemblance?

Now, when I start to giggle during treatment tomorrow, I'll have to show this picture to my therapist.