We had a “final” meet with the Hemo Oncol­o­gist this after­noon and got the pass off to the Radi­a­tion Oncol­ogy side of the build­ing. Final is in quotes because there is a con­tin­u­ing rela­tion­ship between Donna and Dr. Ergul because there will be quar­terly blood test­ing for a year to be sure noth­ing pops up, then semi annu­ally for the fol­low­ing 4 years while she is tak­ing the hor­mone pre­ven­ta­tive med­i­cine, Tamox­ifen (AKA, Phase Three.)

First meet­ing with the radi­a­tion doc will be next Thurs­day which I guess he will out­line Phase Two of Donna’s treat­ment, six weeks of 5 days a week of microwav­ing breast tis­sue. I’m sure there will be pre­treat­ment tests of some sort before that can begin. As it is they won’t start treat­ments until at least 4 weeks after ces­sa­tion of the chemo and this Fri­day will only be 2 weeks.

All in all for just 12 days post chemo Donna is doing pretty well. No more nau­sea, but she has some mouth sores that are lim­it­ing what tastes good. Her energy level is pretty good and she is want­ing to start back work­ing eight hour days, I talked her into wait­ing until next week before try­ing that.

Every year ASCO has one of Augusta hos­pi­tals bring over their mobile mam­mo­gram unit. It isn’t free, but the com­pany pro­vides a $200 well­ness ben­e­fit to off­set most or all the cost of the test. Donna always goes to her doc­tor, but you can see where it might be pop­u­lar for the hourly employ­ees, they can get that lit­tle bit of diag­nos­tics taken care of on com­pany time, they don’t have to take vaca­tion or an atten­dance point. Each year they get an aver­age of 35 women to sign up.

This year, with Donna’s diag­no­sis, her open­ness to talk about her dis­ease and vocal urg­ing to peo­ple to get a mam­mo­gram, they have 74 sign-ups.

Today I got to see first hand what those four lit­tle cross-hairs that are stuck on Donna’s chest are for. She asked the techs yes­ter­day if it was OK to bring me in and watch a treat­ment so I would know what was hap­pen­ing and they said OK. Plus then I could describe the process to her, because she has to remove her glasses and then can’t really tell what is going on.

Upon arrival she goes into a chang­ing room to swap her upper clothes for a hos­pi­tal gown. After a short wait Donna gets called back into the treat­ment room where she lays on the a table that has her per­son­al­ized molded foam pad on it. The pads are blue and everyone’s is hang­ing on a rack on the left side of the room like so many over­coats in a hat check room. The pad is prob­a­bly the same tech­nol­ogy as used in the cus­tom seats F1 dri­vers use. At work we use some­thing sim­i­lar for pack­ing things for ship­ping, a reac­tion between two chem­i­cals in a bag makes a foam that expands to fit tightly around an object.

Once she is sit­u­ated, they raise the table to shoul­der height and move it into the cen­ter of the room. Here is where another famil­iar tech­nol­ogy is used in a dif­fer­ent man­ner. On two walls of the room are some­thing resem­bling those fancy laser lev­els from Home Depot. Four bright green lines cross in the mid­dle of the room and then Donna is inched and nudged so that these lines cross exactly through the cross-hair stick­ers on Donna’s torso. She is told to hold still and the tech leaves the room clos­ing the one foot thick bank vault look­ing door behind her.

Out­side two tech­ni­cians sit watch­ing two video mon­i­tors on their left show­ing the inte­rior of the treat­ment room. On the right of their sta­tion are a cou­ple of com­puter mon­i­tors that show what looks like a main­frame style ter­mi­nal pro­gram (maybe DOS, but thank­fully not Microsoft Win­dows) that con­trols the “ray gun.” I don’t know what else to call it, but it is noth­ing like you might imag­ine a ray gun in a James Bond or Flash Gor­don movie to be. It is more like a giant dough­nut cut in half or a big “C” sur­round­ing the front of the table. One side has a lit­tle win­dow in it where the focused radi­a­tion beam will exit. A sim­ple mouse click and the treat­ment begins. The C-shape rotates a lit­tle, to get to the proper angle, so it is just hit­ting the breast and not any inter­nal part of the body. Lit­tle num­bers jump around on the mon­i­tors and 48 secs later it stops. Mouse click 2 sends the ray gun rotat­ing 190 degrees on it’s axis, so the win­dow is on the other side of Donna’s body aim­ing up and once again skim­ming the body and just blast­ing breast tis­sue. We count­down 48 more sec­onds, done.

The tech then opens the vault and calls in that they’re done. The table is retracted and low­ered so Donna can hop off. Back to the dress­ing room to dis­card the gown and get redressed. The whole thing takes less than 15 min­utes. Bye, see you tomorrow.

Only 29 more to go.