Just Call Me Freckles

Alrighty then! So far so good on the radiation front - 3 treatments down, only 27 more to go!

 As you'll recall in my last post, I was last entrenched in an epic battle for the good of the Republic in the MRI machine. Now I'm stuck in the middle of rush hour in NYC in the middle of radiation.

HHOOOOOOONNNKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!

Yeah, that's the lovely sound the radiation machine makes while it is shooting me full of...well, radiation.

I started the week with an appointment for radiation simulation. I know the techs are highly skilled, and it's an important thing to do, and there's a PHYSICIST that develops my treatment plan (yes - Physicist!!) but the whole morning felt like tic-tac-toe for beginners. By the time I left my chest was covered with purple x's & o's, little dots, and what I'm pretty sure was the beginnings of a abstract self-portrait of one of the techs. Add all that to the existing scars, port & overall asymmetrical look of my body right now, and I looked pretty hot!

On Tuesday I went back to make sure all the pictures, x-rays, CT scans & MRI's lined up with all the pretty pictures they drew the day before. Hooray! I passed!

So, I'm up on the Frankenstein reanimation radiation table that moves by remote control (!), right arm over my head, looking at the pictures of Happy Little Trees on the ceiling (Yep, there is a picture of trees on the ceiling), cancer-y area exposed for all to see and UP pops my doctor.

Seriously.

From out of nowhere she appears. Like a twisted game of whack-a-mole. Does she have a super secret series of tunnels under the clinic? Can she just pop up where ever she wants??  Apparently I'd never realized how short she was until I was hovering 5 ft. in the air, cause she has a dedicated stool to stand on so she can talk to patients while they're on the table. Thank goodness she didn't scare me, cause my ass would have fallen that 5 ft. onto a very cold, hard tile floor. Luckily I only got a case of the giggles, which I passed on to Dr. Luder, then to one tech, then the other. Probably took us about 2 minutes to get control of ourselves enough to be serious about the radiation.

Then I got tattoos. What a let down.

I'd been anticipating the whole tattooing thing for months, it's been my mental joke since I don't like needles. "I didn't go out and get drunk then get a tattoo, I just got cancer."

It's definitely not like you see on LA Ink. No Kat Von D, no cool designs, hell...there wasn't even a tattoo gun. WTF??? They dabbed ink on me, then jabbed me with a diabetic testing needle thingy - HARD! Like a prison tattoo, or some old-school tribal junk where they use a sharpened stick & a hammer. And one stick for each blot of ink, that's it.

Basically, I have 7 new freckles. Booo-rrrr-ing.

And now that I have tattoos, they use laser beams to line me up and...HHHHOOOOONNNNKKKKK!!!!!!

Ugh.

Really? That's the sound it has to make? It can't play the first few bars of Beethoven's 5th? or even Yankee Doodle Dandy??

No.

HHHHHOOOONNNNNNKKKKK!!!!!!

At least I have Happy Little Trees to look at.