Today's events: My friends volunteered for Houston hospital duty. David from FEMA came as advertised (our payment should arrive in our account within 5 business days -- unbelievably efficient). I talked to my sister-in-law about Ben coverage for the part of my hospital stay when Bill's with me. I got a too sweet card from Ben's best friend's mom.
And, I wore the jade and silver Chinese "Good Luck" earrings from Vicky to go get irradiated for the 1st time. Four cheerful young women staff the radiation machine room. Today was a double-time appointment. The 1st 15 minutes they set me up, did an Xray to confirm the positioning (something I guess I get every day), moved the machine around in the pattern, and got confirmation from the Doc. Then during the 2nd 15 minutes, they did it for real.
I lie on my back with my arm in the mold they created last week. They measured against pen marks on the mold to align my arm exactly the same way it had been in the mold initially. There are two large mechanical arms, one with a circular face, the other a rectangle, that move around me. There's also an array behind my head that may or may not be moving -- it's just out of my field of vision. There's a lovely large back lit photo of a lake in the mountains (but they don't know what lake it is) that I see when the machine arms have swung to the sides. The young women leave the room when the radiation actually happens, but come back in to take measurements in between beams. However, I don't have a shield on my core. The machines buzzed like Xray machines do.
No pain, no immediate side effects. Just the hard work of calming one's mind racing into panic mode: I'm being irradiated! What does that make me -- a plant? Haven't we been told all our lives to avoid radiation? What am I doing here? Isn't it dangerous? Holli suggested meditating, or at least using some kind of calming mantra to focus on healing during the process. I shut my eyes, mostly, and tried to focus on wellness and happy thoughts.
They gave me some lovely herbal salve to put on my arm -- starting now, even though it isn't burned yet. They told me to avoid taking vitamin and herbal supplements that would give me large doses of vitamins A, C or E, or anti-oxidants, because the radiation creates free radicals, and the anti-oxidants "scavenge" those radicals, which compromises the treatment. Massive doses of anti-oxidants (like fulvic acid), are of course exactly what homeopaths, nutritionists and alternative medicine practitioners prescribe for people receiving radiation therapy, because free radicals are bad for you.
I came home and suggested to Bill we go to Cozumel over Thanksgiving.
Later, it being the first night of Sukkot (the Jewish harvest holiday), Ben assembled a lulav (three sets of leaves -- myrtle, palm and willow -- that are fragrant and rustle nicely) and shook it and the etrog (a citron -- a very sweet smelling lemon-like fruit) to the four corners of the earth, the sky and the ground. Let's hear it for the bounty of the earth. And let's keep the farmers in mind, especially this harvest season when some of our local farmers all of a sudden don't have so much to show for their year, which was mostly very dry, but then turned to flood. The other part of Sukkot is that we're supposed to eat and hang out and even sleep in an outdoor shelter. That, we didn't do. It was windy and threatening rain, again. Fortunately for us, there's another seven nights of opportunity (at least to eat outside).
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