Lila was pretty tired when she called. Not very communicative. I could hear it in her voice. She has to remain completely immobile while they are shooting the juice. They're blasting tumors on the lymph nodes in her neck. That's Step 1. It's a course of 14 treatments, over three weeks. It was uncomfortable, painful (she didn't have a working analogy, but said her whole face just 'hurt like hell,' which works for me).
Tomorrow's another radiation day, less rigorous, she says. Only a couple of minutes, with x-rays. Wednesday she starts chemo, with this exotic cocktail of stuff.
At some point in this, this week, I think, she's gonna have installed in her chest somewhere a sort of 'trap door,' a ready opening to her veins so that, upon the inevitable continued applications of sharp needles to weakened veins, and the veins retreat, and hide and get real cute, and it hurts like a sumbitch when they hafta go poking around for a good point of entry for intravenous treatments, they've got one. This is important because, as i understand it, part of the prospective treatment consists in implanting small, highly radioactive pellets at the site of the most aggressive tumors, but not all at once. As I understand it. This is pretty much third-hand.
Lila seems to have a command of the details, as one would expect. The technology makes sense to me because I had a couple stents shoved up my femoral artery into my heart a couple of years ago. Aside: the hospital that did my procedure does about 75-100 per week. It's like an assembly line...or a dissembly line...
So it begins. Wish us luck...
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You are right: Attitude IS destiny.
When my mother had her cancer, she survived a lot longer than they thought she would. Why? Because my father changed jobs and moved them to L.A., where her emotional roots were. She had many friends from her high school days there (and so did my father, which helped him too), and her own mother (who was still alive at the time) was also in the area and still able to visit.
Keep the faith, Woody. Doctors don't know everything. [[[hug]]]
What you're talking about is a central line....It's used for dialysis as well as chemo.
You're in my thoughts every day, Woody.
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