Samain and the Radiation Moon
Tuesday gratefuls: Todd. Alise. Varian. Clinac. Warm blankets. My plastic guide. Sniper rifle beams. Radiation entering my body, headed toward T4 bone marrow/lesion. Only nine sessions to go. Pain still gone. Hip, too. Wearing neck brace when I drive. My treatment November. Chart House. Luke and Leo coming today. Shadow inside. Yeah!
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Medical Engineering
Life Kavannah: Wu Wei Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress
Week Kavannah: Gevurah “While Chesed is associated with flow, Gevurah provides the structure that allows this flow, acting like river banks to channel energy. It is seen as essential for establishing healthy boundaries, creating space for important work, and preserving what is most valuable.”
Tarot: Being a metaPhysician
One brief shining: No Cyberknife moving in its calculated dance around my body, this time a Varian Clinac iX, which Alise controls from a multi-screened room on the other side of the thick lead door that closes quietly, leaving me alone with a linear accelerator hulking behind me, and the precision locating beams-red and green-reading my location as the Clinac moves, buzzing and clicking.
Cancer: This session of radiation, my third, has a single target, the lesion in my bone marrow at T4. Instead of going all the way to Lonetree, I hop off 470 at Broadway and head up to Rocky Mountain Cancer Care (RMCC).
Most of the treatment in this case involves positioning my body accurately, using green and red lasers plus the plastic mesh that fits under my chin and over my bare upper thorax. Alise put it in place using the tattoos, small black dots inked on the sides of my chest by Todd during the CT planning procedure.
Since precision in aiming the beam of radiation is key both to killing the cancer cells and not damaging the rest of me, I get the need for multiple ways of saying go here, not there to the radiation. In and out in twenty minutes, less than five of which involved actual radiation.
Back and hip pain: The ablation continues to give me a pain free left lower back and upper left. The hip feels mostly good, too. Just a bit of tweak if I move in an odd angle.
Lower back right still has significant tightness, a little pain. Since the ablations only work on the arthritis, Kylie told me to expect pain from the bulging discs to continue. She was right.
Even so, a huge improvement. My driving stamina, which I will test each day going to RMCC, has improved, too, but not nearly as much as I had hoped. I was not in agony on the drive home, but I was still pretty uncomfortable. That’s with a fifty minute drive out, some sitting and then a drive back for fifty minutes.
I’m going to up my resistance work, stretching, see if I can do better with stronger core muscles.
This sort of adaptation, relief and its limitations, continue the journey of an aging body/self.
Opera: Not usually my thing though I love Wagner. I know, I know, an anti-semite, but what an artist! Watched an opera initiated by Yin, of Scott and Yin, with other members of the Chinese Heritage Foundation and staged by the San Francisco Opera.
An amazing, engaging, important work. The Journey of the Monkey King. If you can see it, take the chance. It will not disappoint you. Both libretto and the staging are, in my opinion, genius.