I thought I was alone in my ignorance concerning radiation treatment. Until I actually went through the process of getting radiated myself I was under the assumption that radiation was somehow connected to chemotherapy. I don’t know if I thought it was the application of the chemo drug or what, but the reality is that I had no idea what it meant to have chemotherapy AND radiation treatment. The more conversations I have the more I realize that I’m not the only one.

While I claim no mastery over the radiation process itself and while I am unwilling to do weak wikipedia research to pretend to have a mastery over the subject–I can share with you some of my experience concerning what the heck radiation is all about!

• Radiation is like an X-Ray (I accidentally just typed “X-Ryan” which is kind of awesome) in that it’s shooting beams into your body. The difference is that the type of beam they use is much stronger and more invasive. Essentially you’refrying parts of your body in hopes of frying the tumor/cancer to the point of extinction.
• Before you ever start radiation treatment you go into a room and have CaT scan of your body so that a physicist, radiologist, and a dosimetrist can figure out how exactly to shoot the beams into your body to maximize the amount of burnage your tumor gets while minimizing the amount of fryage your other body parts get. After the make a plan using your scans they’ll then bring you in, put you on the table, line you up right, and take some X-Ray’s. They’ll compare your body, with your X-Ray’s, with your CT scan and make sure that everything’s perfect. If that’s the case then you’re now good to go to get fried.
• You get a few tattoos (I assume this varies depending on what you’re getting radiated) that help the doctors to line your body up the exact same way each time you go in for treatment.
• So you’ve got your tattoos, you’ve got your plan, now its time to actually get radiated. Generally, if I’m not mistaken (and in my experience) you go in five days a week at the same time every day for your relatively short 15 minute radiation treatment. What you do is you go into the dark room, lay down on the hard table that’s setup in the specs that your docs have already determined, and then the radiation techs begin the awkward process of making sure you’re lined up all perfect. They wiggle you around, slide you back and forth, move the table up and down, and push your fat belly to one side or the other so that in the end your tattoos are all lined up with their lasers that are used for measurements. Once you’re all lined up they leave the room and you get to “assume the position” (for me, it was arms above the head as if I was trying to pose all sexy-like) and a giant arm maneuvers around your body and beeps. Turns out when it beeps it’s actually shooting high level radiation into your body…but the reality is that you don’t feel a thing.
• Like I just said, during radiation you don’t really feel a thing (just like an X-Ray). Radiation, like many things, builds up over time and the more you get it the more your body gets depleted from it. My treatment didn’t include my skin (breast cancer treatments can really fry your skin in nasty ways) so I only got a minor sunburn on my skin by the end. Eventually what became normal was that about an hour post treatment I’d start to be real tired and my body would shut down a bit. But during the treatment itself I never could tell if anything in particular was actually happening.
• Most people go in for chemotherapy treatments–this is the iconic images we have of people sitting in Lazyboys for hours at a time. This wasn’t my experience. I take pills. At home. And I grieve for those that must go in for the chemo treatments. It sucks to hang out at oncology clinics. Regardless these treatments are completely separate from radiation (though the two work in partnership together to kill cancer).

I’m sure that someone could write from a more knowledgable position about all of this, but for me this was my experience. We became somewhat close with the three ladies who radiated me every morning–I could tell you their Starbucks coffee drink of choice, I could tell you what they do on the weekends, how many kids they have, etc. They make the appointments better. I could tell you (or even show you) the maps of my body that show how much radiation my heart, lungs, and other parts received. I could relate stories (though they’re not mine to tell) of how my mother-in-laws radiation treatment varied significantly from mine and how bad her burns were among other things. There’s always more to say! At the very least I hope that, like me, you’re coming to a more clear understanding regarding all this crazy and mysterious stuff that we put our bodies through in order to get rid of these mutant cells known as cancer.