5/17/26
I just finished my first week of radiation. Honestly, it’s pretty uneventful — they’ve really got it down to a science.
My treatment is at 1:30 in the afternoon. I leave the house at 12:30, it’s about 35 miles — half interstate, half surface roads through Moss Point and into Pascagoula — and the round trip runs about two hours door to door. I’ve asked them to move me later in the afternoon if a slot opens up. We go out almost every morning — birding, boating, fishing — and the later I can schedule the radiation, the more flexibility we have for whatever we’re doing that day.
I arrive at the cancer center and check in with the receptionist at the radiation department. I give my name and she waves me on back. There’s a main waiting room and then a smaller one in the back for those of us doing radiation. It’s a consistent schedules, so you start to recognize the same faces coming and going. Usually I’m only sitting a few minutes before one of the technicians — I know them all by now — comes out and we walk back together into what they call the vault.
There are two vaults; I’ve only been in one. Once inside, you lie down on a table that’s molded to your body — your legs fit into a form and they hand you a donut-shaped handle to hold; stabilizing your arms.. They position you just so, sometimes making small adjustments. Then they all leave the vault and the machine takes over.
It’s an impressive piece of equipment. Two large flat panels — kind of like oversized white monitors — extend out on either side and rotate around you, imaging first clockwise, then counterclockwise. That’s how the machine calibrates your exact position. Once that’s done, the imaging arms retract and the treatment head — a large round unit on a heavy arm — swings out and makes its passes, going all the way around and back again. The moment it shuts off, the technicians walk back in as the machine is retracting over your head.
And that’s it. The whole thing takes about 15 minutes. You slide your pants down to mid-thigh going in, they keep a towel over you, and when it’s done you reach out, pull your pants back up, sit up, and you’re on your way. The team is wonderful — professional, warm, genuinely good people.
As for symptoms: there’s an increasing sensation, hard to even describe — somewhere between a rash and an itch; it started out very subtle but increases daily. Now I have two days off to heal, and start back Monday.. If you try to scratch it you can’t quite find it; it feels like it’s just below the surface.
The bigger nuisances are the appetite and the fatigue. You know me — I’ve been thin my whole life. Now I want to eat constantly, and not just sweets, food. I can finish a full dinner feeling absolutely stuffed, get up and find myself searching the refrigerator.. It almost feels psychological. The heat flashes are becoming a bit more frequent too, though nothing like what I’ve watched Patty go through. And the fatigue is real — not sleepiness exactly, more like a heaviness. You can take a nap and wake up feeling exactly the same. All of it is very bearable, just worth noting.
I’ve also fallen out of my gym routine. Been going for years, but the last four or five months have been busy and distracting. I keep telling myself to get back to it; Monday.
Overall, I feel very confident about this. I believe the diagnosis is right and the path we’ve chosen is right. The one real concern over the next couple of months is urine flow. My prostate has been large for years, which already made things weak, and just in this first week I can feel it getting weaker and more uncomfortable — not excruciating, but aggravating. That’s Dr. Greenfield’s main concern right now too. Worst case would be a temporary catheter through the process, and if it comes to that, we’ll deal with it. I intend to live until I die, and this is just part of it.
“Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.”
Richard Bach –Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah