I finish my last radiation treatment on Friday-- yay!! Overall, radiation has not been bad, other than a few GI issues and being tired, it's just been an inconvenience where I have to get out of the house earlier than usual. But I will not miss it one bit. I continue to be annoyed by the clear difference in bedside manner between the male techs and females....and I don't know why they don't mix it up. Where I work, we always try to have a male and a female on the shift because we serve men and women at our shelters. We know that there are some issues that a man or a woman are going to feel more comfortable bringing to a person who shares their gender. Also, it is a lot more comfortable to have a woman do the inspections of the females rooms/dorms than to have a man do it. At radiation, there are two rooms and two sets of techs and it is almost always two women for one room and two men for the other, why don't they do one of each? I'm laying there with a g-d pillow case covering the lower half of my body...I get they can't always match people by gender 100% of the time but if they had mixed gender teams, it would possibly make patients feel a little more comfortable....and frankly, they might decrease their risk of having any false allegations brought against staff....maybe my line of work makes me go there un-necessarily and the rest of the world doesn't work that way, but I think it is always a good idea to minimize risk. It's interesting to me that this bothers me so much-- I went through 3 years of fertility treatments where I had male doctors being much more "up in my business" than in radiation and it was never an issue but, for some reason it annoys me now.
Anyway....I tried to schedule my PET scan this week and ran into a bit of an issue. Apparently you can't have a PET scan done until 6-8 weeks after radiation is done due to the inflammation. This really screws with the time line I have in my head of when I can close the book on this stinking nightmare. My doctor ordered a CT scan for me instead and "feels confident" that will be enough. I was reminded by the nurse that my doctor is "very cautious" so I can trust him on this. To which I reminded her that I have already had a clear CT scan in July (the week before I started chemo) and I need more reassurance. Frankly, if all they needed was a clear ct scan to tell me I'm cancer free, why the F did I go through 6 months of hell with chemo followed by more chemo and radiation?? So....I told her I needed to think about it but I'm pretty sure I'm going to wait for the PET scan. I am hoping that I can still meet with the colorectal surgeon and get my re-section surgery scheduled without much delay (you can't have the surgery until 6 weeks after radiation either). Basically I hope I can have the surgery scheduled for the end of April and have my PET scan in the middle of April....hopefully it will be all clear and we can proceed with the surgery. If it isn't all clear, we obviously just cancel the surgery. But who knows if my surgeon will go for that. In the meantime, I am going to try to schedule a family vacation. I am in desperate need of some warm weather and a break, plus it will help us focus on something else other than the what if's of the PET scan.
So that's all for now. It may be several weeks before I have any other news to share and hopefully that will be good news!
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