Scans and such

I asked the lovely people at the hospital whether I could have copies of the CT scan report that they get. They very nicely said that I could. And so I got a colour photocopy of one of the outputs they get. And this is the main scan (on the left).

It looks like a close-up of a particularly bad bit of knitting. If you want to get into, or you enjoy knitting, go to http://www.stitchnbitch.co.uk/ - especially if you're in London. The picture is actually a mirror image in as much as the left and the right are swapped. But the front is at the top and the back is at the bottom. I'm not quite sure what the greenish zones represent, but the blue squiggly line represents the area that is to be, and indeed is being, zapped. There's a little bit of me that feels a tad uncomfortable about the blue line being a little squiggly. But I'm sure it's fine. There are other pictures on the report, but I've forgotten what they mean. I'll ask again tomorrow.

But some people have suggested that my skull looks a little empty when you look at the CT Scan. Huh! I've added an early MRI scan to prove otherwise...

Zap 3

I wasn't late today so I think they didn't tighten the mask down so much. Yes, I know that's just my imagination, but it's certainly ensured that I turn up on time every day from now on.

I'm getting sort-of used to the zapping now. I talked to the team before the session started this morning, to ask them if they could occasionally say something just so that I know they haven't run away or something. There are a couple of times during the session when everything goes quiet and you wonder what's going on. You can't exactly move much and although they say they can hear you clearly, it's not convincing. Your mind starts to wander and think about films like "28 days later" and you wonder how easy it would be to release yourself from the table...

It turns out that the very quiet bit is because they've been doing CT scans as well as zapping me. The CT scans are to ensure that everything is positioned correctly and that I'm being zapped in the right places and so after they've done these scans they have to analyse the results to make sure everything is okay.

I had a brief meeting with Nick after the zapping and he's happy about how everything is going. So that's nice.

Prequel

This post is probably not very important except that some people, if they're reading this because they're going through the same sort of stuff, may find it helpful. Maybe not. Who knows?

Anyway, tomorrow I go for my very first radiotherapy treatment - or my first zap, as I shall refer to them as from now on. I've had a lot of support from lots of different people; home, family, work, friends, and they've all wished me luck and asked how I feel about being zapped.

To be quite honest, I have no feelings at all, really. As I've suggested in a previous post, the mask fitting was not something I was looking forward to and that turned out to be totally uneventful (I'm not complaining!) Unless someone is lying to me, tomorrow sounds like it's going to be similarly uninteresting. That I will just lie there, hearing a machine zip around and feeling the "bed" I'm on (the reason I put "bed" in inverted commas is that they may as well call it a table for all the comfort it provides) moving in and out of the CT scanner - which it may or may not do. And then 10 or fifteen minutes later they'll say "thanks" and off I'll go.

We'll see...