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Radiotherapy's Over!

6 years ago1,625 words

Finally! Also some rambling about the procedure I had to go through, and some thoughts I've been having while lying ill in bed about the fragmented nature of the mental self... or something. I'm quite out of it at the moment.

I had my 30th and final session of radiotherapy on Thursday. It's strange. I mean, it's a relief, of course, that I got through it, and that I don't seem to be as cognitively impaired as I dreaded I might be, but I'd got used to the routine of going to the hospital most days, talking briefly with the receptionists and radiographers, having some clear external-world structure to my life. From now on, it'll just be me in my room in front of this computer like before, and while I welcome that 'freedom' on one level, on another it feels like a loss, a prison...

There are a few things I want to talk about in this post, but first, since it was the last session, I asked if it was okay to take a picture of the machine (I wondered whether there might be some stupid regulations forbidding it for whatever reason, but apparently not). I took this:



I also took one of the mask:



I was able to take that mask home with me, so I have it with me now. It's an odd artefact to have hanging around. A memento of this extremely exciting adventure.

That machine - and the mask - were what I was strapped into too often over the past six weeks. I'd lie on the table, and the mask would be placed on my head so I couldn't move it at all. Then, the two or three radiographers would align some lasers or something while moving and adjusting the table precisely; I never actually saw any of this though because I always shut my eyes.

They'd leave the room, and then there'd be like four minutes where the machine ran some kind of brain scan to ensure as much accuracy as possible. This was the part I hated most, since there wasn't any perceivable progress for me; I'd hear some occasional clicks, but other than that it was just waiting in (relative) silence for an indeterminate amount of time, locked into a head prison. Four minutes sounds like nothing, but when you're in that position, or at least when someone neurotic like me is, it seems to drag on forever.

After that apparent eternity, the treatment machine started up, which sounded like a loud buzz, kind of like a bee or a dentist's drill or something. The radiation beam was fired out of the round top bit you can see on the machine in the image, and the entire machine would rotate around 360 degrees, to fire into my head from every angle. For each degree, precise computations altered the radiation dose and shape of the beam to minimise the damage to healthy cells. The machine did one 360 arc, which took around 40 seconds, before pausing for a moment, then doing another, again about 40 seconds. When it finished, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief, and was rescued from the mask for another day.

Nothing about the treatment directly hurt at all; I didn't feel anything when the radiation was 'going in'. I experienced some minor wooziness after standing up... though that could have been due to lying down as much as anything. It got worse towards the end, but then I also got - and still have - a bad cold which surely contributed to that.

I'm unsure at this point what the effects of this will be. The treatment certainly didn't 'cure' or destroy the cancer cells; apparently the next proper brain scan I'll have - in five weeks - is expected to look exactly the same as the post-surgery-but-pre-radiotherapy one, and that any dissolving of what's left of that aberrant lump will take years to disappear, if it ever does. This whole process has just been a way of 'freezing' it so it doesn't continue to grow, or to spread. Hopefully it'll work for that... but even that's no guarantee. This could still kill me, if the whims of fate decide on that.

The most obvious effect is the hair loss, though, and it's not subtle. I have no hair where the beam went in, which, because the machine arced in a 2D plane, is essentially a ring. It's like I'm a reverse ∞ monk ∞, or something; there's hair at the top and the bottom, but then just above my ears there's this ring of bare scalp, about five or six centimetres thick (so clearly the beam wasn't just some super-precise laser-like thing; I was repeatedly penetrated by something rather more girthy, oh my). I think I might just shave off the rest (it looks awful anyway) and grow it back uniformly... or so I've been saying for ages, but haven't yet. Maybe soon, now, since the treatment's over. We'll see. I suppose it's not an easy thing to say goodbye to something as socially important as head hair.

(I know I've talked about all this elsewhere, but it helps to get it all out in one place now at this point.)

The doctor told me on Wednesday that it might take me months to recover by '50%', in terms of energy, so it's not like now that the sessions are over, the effects are. I want to return to working on games and things - Sindrel Song in particular - as soon as possible, but obviously it seems sensible to rest as much as I need to for the time being. I'll just have to not push myself, see how it all works out.

(The doctor also told me most people take at least three months off work while recovering from radiotherapy, and seemed surprised - almost irritated - that I'd been trying to make anything at all when I told him what I'd been spending my time doing. Most of those people wouldn't have had major brain surgery three months earlier, either.)



I've been unable to get out of bed for the past few days (which is why I'm writing this on Sunday rather than the day it was most relevant), and I've had a lot of thoughts swimming around my mind during this time... I was going to write some out here, but it seems I don't have the energy to do so coherently. Or to even really sit at my computer for prolonged periods. It's really annoying. I just hope this passes sooner rather than later.

Dark thoughts have definitely been overwhelming me though... I suppose it's hard for them not to in such a bleak position, especially considering that I don't exactly have any close loved ones to talk to at all through any of this. I woke up from a dream this morning where I was sexlessly cuddling up against some girl, a stranger, and it felt like being thrown out into the bitter winter cold when the reality hit me, that I just don't have anyone so close to me. And then of course that brings forth a bunch of thoughts about how I have had that before, but faults on my part soured those connections, pushed people away. It's my fault that I'm alone like this.

But then is it 'my' fault? It feels like the inner demon's fault; like so much of my behaviour wasn't quite my behaviour... Maybe that's easy to think in hindsight? It's not so much a shirking of responsibility, but rather more like a feeling of possession, like something 'took over me' and it wasn't quite 'me', whatever 'me' even is. The night before last, I was so sick while lying in bed that my body didn't seem to respond to my commands that it get up out of bed; I pictured vividly the exact movements I'd have to perform, but my muscles didn't move. My mother checked on me, and while my mind was relatively alert, jumping from one thought to another, chatty, my actual verbal output to her was slurred and sluggish, the kind of barely-talking a Sick Person would manage. It felt like I was acting in some sense, but I was confused as to why, who for, who was making that decision, whether I was being genuine or not. It certainly wasn't deliberate pretending or lying, but maybe it was within the same realm of the psychosomatic placebo and nocebo effects? Or the suggestion invoked by hypnotists?

I don't know. It's strange. I've been watching my mind a lot since this whole affair started to check for any cognitive deficits (I haven't found any serious ones yet, but then if my brain was broken, would I be able to detect that using that same broken brain?). Things like this stand out to me, and it's fairly obvious that our minds aren't just one single Self, as common sense might have us believe. I've read in detail about that before, about the various 'nodes' within the mind that operate independently to a degree to influence behaviour like employees in a company, and I understand the neuroanatomy of a lot of it, but... well, I suppose it's all very complicated and beyond the scope of this post that I'm writing in a semi-stupor state. Perhaps it's something I can look into at some point, to understand it better.

Anyway. I'm clearly not in the best state of mind, so I'll leave it at this for now! Hopefully I'll write about something more interesting soon.