Radiation Therapy

The preliminaries are now finished and I am set to start radiation therapy tomorrow afternoon.  Whew!  The waiting is finally over!  It feels very good to now be getting on the way!

My Tumour

I have a tumour which seems to have begun on the outside of the colon in the vicinity of the original site.  This tumour has evaded detection and anchored itself to the sacrum, where it has now penetrated the bone.  It has also grown into the rectum, although it barely shows there on the sigmoidoscopy.  The involvement of the sacrum is particularly disturbing, considering both the high density of nerves which pass through this structure and the difficulty of totally eliminating cancer from bone.

Having cancer in the sacrum is a painful proposition.  Hence, the priority at this stage is to provide some pain relief by knocking the cancer back through radiation.

Radiation Therapy

I was scanned and tattooed today in preparation for radiation therapy.  The intent is to deliver a measured dose of radiation to the tumour without doing too much damage to surrounding healthy tissue. There are some slight side-effects but nothing that is expected to be too uncomfortable.  It is all very technical and I don't understand the half of it.  I will have 15 daily treatments beginning September 24 and ending about October 15th, with weekends off.  Each treatment session takes only a few minutes.

The Radiation Clinic at the BC Cancer Agency is an excellent facility.  I have found the doctors, nurses, technicians and staff to all be very caring and competant.  It is a very busy place!

I have been told that radiation usually does a good job of alleviating the pain of this type of cancer but that it does not usually eliminate ALL of the cancer.  Thus, the possibility of more chemo down the road.  But that is down the road.  For tomorrow and the next days we can hope for the best possible outcome from this particular therapy.  And a little pain relief would be a great blessing in its own!

Here it goes again...  Rob; in Vancouver

“What medicines do not heal, the lance will;

what the lance does not heal, fire will.”

Hippocrates