Cancer update: I am now fully baked

Since I told you all about my cancer treatment, here is an update.

“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”

I have completed my 28 radiation treatments. Here’s a picture of me inside the enormous radiation machine at Maine Medical Center in Scarborough, Maine.

The preparation I got from my physical therapist and my dietitian was extremely helpful. The dietitian also had suggestions during the treatment that helped me to manage the side effects.

The suggestions and support I got from all of my readers and friends were also helpful.

I was disciplined about preparing for the daily treatments, and I believe that discipline helped me to stay still in exactly the position and condition that the doctors had asked for. That likely improved the effectiveness of the treatment and reduced the side effects. If you’re going to go through this, it’s worth some effort to get it right.

There were side effects. I won’t go into detail — you really don’t want to know — but those side effects were best described as bothersome. They interfered with my sleep and upset my digestion. I took the doctors’ advice on how to medicate to reduce the effects. They were tolerable, and I tolerated them.

The doctors now tell me that due to the cumulative effect of the therapy, I’m likely to continue to have the side effects for two more weeks, after which they’ll subside. I’m looking forward to that.

It was a good choice to keep my workload tolerable during this time period. The combination of the time spent preparing for therapy, traveling to it, getting it, and traveling back from it cut into my productive work hours, and the side effects reduced my stamina. It was frustrating not to bid on some projects that looked like fun, but it was the right decision.

As you might imagine, radiation messes up the cells in your prostate and therefore interferes with blood tests that detect prostate cancer. But in about three months, I’ll be healed and will be able to get a PSA blood test and see if this treatment worked. It’s very likely that it did.

I did get to ring the bell (anyone who’s been treated for cancer knows which bell). I got a graduation certificate. As to whether my irradiated parts are glowing, I’ll never tell.

Thanks for caring.