Graduation Day

Yesterday Scott shocked me by asking if I realized that we had entered month 16 of my fight against cancer. Could it really be month 16 already? To date I have had 9 surgeries, 19 rounds of chemo (and counting), and 25 radiation treatments. I have lost both my breasts, my nipples, my armpit lymph nodes on the left side of my body, and my hair. It is still hard to wake up each morning and remember that this is my life, so far from the one that 17 months ago I was living. Instead of focusing on what was I am trying to celebrate every small miracle that is granted to prolong my life and yesterday one of those milestones was met.

I have not written often over the duration of my radiation treatments. Truthfully, I don’t know what to say. Each day, five days a week, I go to the office, change into a hospital gown and sit in a waiting room full of other patients, all with cancer. Some days one of the patients wants to lament the fact they have cancer, other days a patient wants to tell their story, but most days we all sit and wait in silence. Once your name is called you walk into the radiation room and lay down on a hard metal table with the machine above your head ready to administer the treatment that might finally annihilate the cancer cells in your body that want to kill you. After your treatment is done you go back to the waiting room, change, and go home. There is only one exception to this routine and that is when the oncologist checks your skin to ensure it is still safe to radiate it. It is monotonous.

Radiation does not bring about an instantaneous side effect, like chemotherapy. Instead it takes weeks of being radiated daily to start to “see” how your body is handling the treatment. You are lulled into believing that your skin can take it because of this delay. I am pretty sure no one can get away unscathed from radiation. Below is how my skin looked at the beginning of each week of treatment. The X at the top left of my body is a sticker that they use to line me up with the radiation grid before each treatment. This is not a permanent tattoo like the dots on my body in previous posts. Most often they call the X your tumor marker.

Pictures do not capture exactly how discolored my skin got nor does it show how intense the heat is from the burned skin. In a post on social media I explained it as feeling like the entrance to Hell was through my armpit. To a friend I described it as having Satan sitting in my armpit. Either way my armpit and chest HURT. The pain is definitely getting worse. Over the past three nights I have been moaning so loudly in my sleep that it has woken Scott up. Last night I moved and the pain was so intense it woke me up.! Below is my skin after round 23.

With the pain intensifying it gives me great pleasure to say that I am officially now done with radiation and I have the diploma to prove it!

With how much I disliked radiation treatment, there was one component that I loved; my radiation technician team. Over the months and months of cancer treatment I can’t think of anything I would label “fun” but seeing them each day made it fun. They are going to forever be in my heart. I made them cookies and wrote them thank you cards but really that was not enough. When they came to get me from the waiting room they were signing “celebrate today, come on!” while clapping and dancing around. I am really going to miss them.

I want to feel some sense of finality but I am beginning to understand that it might never come. Cancer is a fight to survive. During that struggle you straddle the line between life and death as you consume every medicine or treatment in pursuit of adding days, months, or years to your life. I think that there is never a feeling of being done. So instead I will keep doing what I can and celebrating each milestone.