Radiation Begins Today

It begins.  Again.

Radiation treatments will start for me this morning and I have the temporary tattoo markers to show for it:  they use them as guides so the targeted beam hits the right spot every time.   Oh yeah, I'm a rebel, I have three tattoos.  (You have to squint to see them, but still...I want the street cred.  I think I've earned it at this point and then some.)

Looks like I will have a series of thirty-three treatments in total, five days a week, every single week for almost seven weeks until they are completed, with weekends off to heal a little.  Each treatment should last about twenty minutes.

Oh joy.

It could be a whole lot worse, so I am grateful to be here and not in hospice.  Let me just say that up front.  But this has been an exhausting slog and it is not done yet.  How do parents of small children ever explain all of this to them as they go through treatment?

The staff at the UHC Cancer Center have been fantastic all the way through this.  Am so glad that they had great facilities near our house, so that I didn't have to go far away for treatment -- that would have been incredibly rough on The Peanut and she's been through enough this summer with me as it is.

But life goes on, even if our summer has whizzed by in nothing flat and not been all that relaxing.  For us, school begins again next week.

Where did the summer go, seriously??!!??

We still have school supplies to pick up and a few assorted school clothing items to snag, so somewhere today I will be taking The Peanut to shop if at all possible so we can avoid the weekend insanity of the back to school frenzy.  Somehow, in the next week or so, I also have to get my classroom ready for the kids to return.

Or, at least, as ready as I can under the circumstances.



Normally, by this point in the summer, I have washed down all the library shelves and reshelved all the books in the collection properly, and weeded out the ones that are begin to show a lot of wear and not able to be repaired.  This summer I have barely been in the building, and didn't get my usual end of the year cleaning done either due to chemo beginning so quickly after my surgery.

Since I have no idea how I will react to radiation treatments, my usual level of attention to detail may just not be possible, but it is what it is, right?

"It will all work out in the end.  Just keep moving forward."

Welcome to my new mantra.

(Photo via Ronnie.)