Goodbye Radiation Therapy, Hello Pulmonary Rehab

Today I had my last radiation treatment. I am apparently the poster child for people who do well on it. The radiation oncologist asked me if I'd be willing to talk to other patients, and the radiation nurse, as I was leaving, looked like she was sending her firstborn off to her first day of school. Except for needing more sleep than usual, I have had few, if any, of the other side effects that so weirded me out when I read about them in "Radiation Therapy and You." One more reason -- and reminder -- to stay in the moment. And to promise myself not to write things like "Radiation Therapy and You," should such a job offer cross my threshold. And not to listen when doctors like my radiation oncologist, who is prone to hyperbole, say things like: "By the time you're finished, you're going to want to put a bullet in my head." I have no such impulses, although I did try to suggest to her the other day that she might want to consider toning down her rhetoric.

What's next? A three to four week break, with no treatment of any kind, followed by two more chemotherapies beginning either March 11 or March 18. I'll find out tomorrow, when I get my labs done. The next rounds of chemo will be 22 days apart, meaning I will finish up treatment at the end of April. I will get a CT scan before my next chemo, and I am also supposed to see my pulmonologist, although I can't get an appointment until March 6. Finally, I am to enroll in pulmonary rehab. After three phone calls to the U.S.S. Northwestern to try to do so, I was told my pulmonologist needs to send an Rx, notes, and results from my last pulmonary function test to the pulmonary rehab therapist. So I left yet another message; it's almost impossible to talk to an actual person first time out of the chute.

For those of you who haven't seen me in a while, I still have a full head of hair, although it might be thinner than it used to be, and it's definitely grayer. It strikes me as odd how many people inquire about this -- men as well as women.

Today I am somewhat lethargic, possibly due to separation anxiety, or possibly because I might have overdone it yesterday, when I felt so good I didn't even take a nap, or seem to need one. Instead, thanks to my generous friend Nancy G., I took in a matinee performance of "Dolly West's Kitchen," by Frank McGuinness at Timeline Theatre, upstairs at the Wellington Avenue Church (the basement of which was the scene of the founding of Chicago Women in Publishing back in the early seventies). It's a good play by a good company, and I highly recommend it. It's set in County Donegal's Inishowen Peninsula, one of my favorite places, and deftly interweaves some complicated family dynamics with an examination of the Irish Republic's neutrality during World War II and two Irish-American romances, one involving a pair of gay soldiers.

I will sign off now, because it's time to phone in my symptoms to the computerized service that's testing whether tele-reporting of symptoms is more effective than simply telling your doctor what's going on. Modern medicine!