Weird Science

As I continue to keep having cancer, modern medicine continues to amaze me with it strange forms of treatment that I would have, otherwise, never become aware of. But it is the world of Radiation Oncology that never disappoints with its "out of this world" ways in which it uses radioactive materials to nuke tumors. You all remember my post about gamma knife, and what a contraption that was. Well aside from that, I have also had whole brain beam radiation, and breast beam radiation. In both of those, they shoot a controlled beam of radiation at a target. Nothing too crazy. With the head I had to wear a plastic mask the attached me to the table, no screws through my skull, like with GK. And with the breast, they tattooed little dots that they aligned with laser sights, and then shot the X-ray beam at me. But my newest treatment takes the cake for being, well, weird.

It's called Interstitial Radiation, and it's where they insert little tubes through the skin directly into the tumor, and then send a radioactive charged wire zipping through the tube into the tumor to give it a blast of RAD from the inside, pretty cool, huh?

Actually, I do find this stuff fascinating. In fact, remember when I told you my doctor approached me about doing a little film project? Well, what she wants is an informative video to show patients what radiation therapy is all about, because for a lot of people, the idea of radiation is, well, scary. I wasn't really sure what I could do to help, but now that I have so much experience in all different forms of radiation treatments, I have some ideas. I want to do a little documentary about the history of radiation, I'm talking Madam Curie and what not. And how we've harnessed something thought to be so volatile, and really learned how to use it to do some pretty amazing stuff in the world of medicine. And since I've gone through all these different treatments I can give it a real personal first hand point of view.

I'm excited to get started on this project, but first I need to finish up with my treatment, which I'm now looking at as research for my film, and as always, continue to hope that there will be no need for me to do anymore "research".