Radiation

I am on the last phase of my treatment for breast cancer ... radiation. Unlike chemo, it doesn't leave me nauseous or hairless, but it is every day. My normal time is 9:30 a.m. and the procedure involves lying on a platform that moves me up and about to get into the right position. It is very high tech and yet to further adjust me they pull the plain white sheet underneath to get my body in the perfect trajectory. Then they place a piece of rolled up bubble wrap under my breast. It is my own special piece that even has my name on it.

This week the system has been down on three different occasions and there were multiple phone calls as the team tried to reshuffle everyone. My mother expressed concern that if the machine was so inefficient how could I be sure it was working correctly on me. In other words was there a chance I was getting so much radiation that they could use me to light up the neighborhood for Christmas? So today, when I saw the radiologist I asked her, and she assured me that if anything was wrong, it just shut down. Besides, she further explained, it wasn't the radiation machine that kept breaking down, it was the computer. Isn't it always.