Radiation 1.0 (or, Spiderman has retired)

Today was my first radiation treatment. I have to admit that ever since I was at the hospital last week, getting measured and scanned, I have been anxious to meet with them today in order to ask a few questions. Question number one on my mind was, "Why the hell do I have a mask to pin my face down, when you should be radiating my chest?" I was kind of concerned that the answer to that question was going to be, "Your CHEST??"

Luckily, all of my worries were laid to rest after the meeting today. It turns out they were just as confused by the mask as I was. They said it didn't hurt anything, but there was no reason to strap my face to a board if they didn't need to. So, from now on, I'm just plain old Peter Parker (except at home, where I will now have two spiderman masks to play with).

We started with a meeting where we talked in more detail about the procedure. They will be beaming my chest and armpit. I get zapped from the front, then the back, and then they shoot some rays at angle in the side. They are shooting into the same area, but doing it at different angles and from different sides in order to avoid vital organs as much as possible. A small section of my left lung, will get hit, and possibly a small section of my heart (she was going to double check the plan, and I forgot to follow up on the answer).

After the meeting, it was time to get aligned again. They strapped me in, like Hannibal Lecter, and aligned the lasers with my tattoo and the marks on the mask. Once I was lined up, they took the mask off (which was a nice thing). Then they went out to the control room and took some x-rays. Using the x-ray, they aligned me precisely to the CT scan from last week. Once I was realigned, they took some more x-rays to double check the alignment.

The aligning part took about 30 minutes. 30 minutes where I was just lying there, alone in the room. Despite all of the buzzing in the room, I started to fall asleep. I have a tendency, when I fall asleep, to have short dreams where I collide into things (biking into trees is a favorite of mine). The result is that before dozing off I can completely spaz-out, flailing my arms and legs a fool. Knowing this about myself I figured it wouldn't be too cool, if I fell asleep and crashed into a tree, so I fought hard to stay awake.

After the alignment was done, Odin (my radiation machine) moved his big, fat, stubby arm into place and did his thing. Except for an intimidating hum (that sounds exactly like radiation ought to sound) there is no other indication that you are being bombarded with bad stuff. Radiation in itself took about 1 minute. After that, the technicians came back in the room, tattooed me four more times on my upper body, and said, "See you tomorrow".

Tomorrow I'll bring the camera and try to get some pictures of Odin.

Oh yeah, and why the mask? I'm not really sure. Mathilde and I figure that it was probably that surrealistic doctor I wrote about a while ago (the one who kept giving me the stink-eye). Our guess is that being young, and inexperienced, she just went ahead and ordered The Full Monty. I am also getting a heart test that it seems may be unnecessary. But hey, as long as it doesn't hurt, I think every guy would be happy to have a free heat test and few extra spiderman masks kicking around.