Deludia

Radio Active

It looks like I’m headed to Seattle. My oncologist told me today that he is making arrangements to send me over to the Seattle VA Medical Center’s Radiation Oncology Department. I went there just about a year ago and they irradiated the lumbar area of my spine. In my case they do it for pain control. The beam kills cancer cells and good cells, along with them the nerves. It was a medical non-event that amounted more to a sightseeing trip than a medical trip.

For two weeks I lay on a table for five minutes at 10 am each weekday morning. It looked like a modern Frankenstein’s laboratory, with huge equipment suspended precariously above and caution signs showing a lightning bolt cleaving the silhouette of a man in two above the words Radiation Hazard. In spite of the ominous looking white and brushed steel decor, the people are warm and friendly, and helpful beyond anything I had experienced at the VA before.

Normally when you do VA travel, someone will call and ask you if you wish to accept a VA plane ticket or prefer to arrange your own transportation. If you choose to do it yourself they will call you in and give you the sum of $0.33 for each mile to your destination and back. For Spokane to Seattle, that amounted to $133. Or you can accept a flight. The VA gets you an electronic ticket so you just show up at the airport and pick up your ticket. After they ask you if you packed your own bags, if you were approached by a stranger and you say Yes and then No, they will give you a boarding pass and away you go to TSA security. There they make sure that you look like the guy in your photo ID, and then invade the deepest realms of privacy looking and xraying everything you have. Last year I gave thought to just riding through the machine once; I figured it would do the needed radiation and also produce a high quality set of skeletal xray pictures. I could just roll on through and then go home, bypassing further need to travel. But I took the cowards way out and went through their little doorway in my shoeless, beltless attire and then collected up my carry on which did go through the scanner tunnel.

We drove the last time. We did so we could have the car with us and be able to get around Seattle better. It turns out that the Seattle has a deal with the local cab companies and taxis shunt vets here and there where they need to go at no charge to the vet. Kinda cool. They also have a special cafeteria for transient vets (out of towners like me) that serves a great free lunch and dinner, again at no charge to the vet. They have a number of cafeterias in the hospital; more of a food court, really. Anyway the food is pretty good and it is priced inexpensively, so it’s a win-win.

Seattle VA’s Radiation Oncology people are impressive. My personal PA was named Dr. Buhta and she was  incredibly supportive. She and her staff were effcent, polite and caring in all they did. And what they did was spend a couple of weeks killing off the Myeloma beasties squatting with my bone marrow. They warned me to expect some radiatin skin burning– like a sunburn, and they warned about nausea. I got the slightest of burns an no nausea.

Two weeks after I returned home though, I could not stay awake to save my life. It was like a temporary case of narcolepsy. If I sat still or laid down, it wouldn’t take but seconds and I would be sleeping away. When I was awake, I felt exhausted. The problem was that I was sleeping in little fits and starts and never really got a good solid block of sleep. Two hours was a long time. My oncologist gave me Ambien CR and some lorazepam which helped a little. A very little. I came out of it on my own after a few weeks of it. So most of my summer was spent in tired confusion. I was glad indeed when it was over and I got my sea legs back.

Sleeping a lot like that messes with the mind on  a number of levels; forgetfulness, time awareness, and simple thinking was elusive during the dark days of post-radiation. But even that wasn’t too bad. I did manage to go through 61 books on my Kindle as I read between snoozes. I’m quite sure that Amazon relished my infirmity. I do love my Kindle and have pumped a total of 143 books through it as well as a few newspapers, magazines, and subscription blogs.  At the end of the year, their accounting showed that I had spent $950+ on Kindle reading material.

But the myths are not true; one who has undergone radiation doesn’t trigger nuclear sensors at airport security check points. We do not glow in the dark, and the phosphor on our watch faces don’t glow brighter either.

However, I discovered that after radiation I was faster than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and bend steel with my bare hands.