Night Music and Radiation Therapy

Hiccups and chimes of a grandfather clock played a most bizarre duet as my mind and memories wrestled with the darkness of the sleepless night before the dawn of radiation therapy.

Earlier calls and emails of well wishes had left me tripping down rabbit holes full of emotions.

Drifting way back to beyond memory I was told I was x-rayed twice while in the womb. As a breech baby I was sitting upright facing forward. In 1950 the workhorse was the x-ray before being delivered by knife.

In retrospect a most curious ‘welcome to the world’ but here I am, soooo hopefully radiation is still my friend (and kind of midwife) and will blast the lung cancer metastasis to infinity and beyond.

Shampooing with baby shampoo and washing my face with dove soap makes it hard to get pumped up, it’s not exactly the locker room image of champions charging the field. Yet athletes play games, survivors do what it takes to live.

Omen of omens, arriving at the parking lot the opening strains of “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons came through the radio.

“I'm waking up, I feel it in my bones

Enough to make my systems blow

Welcome to the new age, to the new age”

For those who know me well, I despise puzzles yet for today's dawn of my second overtime in life, it was “live as you've never lived before”.

First up the radiologists aligned my virtual self with my real self before being zapped. When I heard the phrase I was not sure if I had fallen back to the Woodstock era or was in casting for an avatar.

As promised the zapping was absolutely painless and frankly kind of cool with the linear particle accelerator spinning around me.

We stopped for a slice of pizza and some retro video table top games at JoJos Pizza in route home. Aligned and radiated did not improve my game playing. My daughter totally kicked my ass on games I played long before she was even born.

Patrick Leer

Health Activist:

Caregivingly Yours, MS Caregiver @ http://caregivinglyyours.blogspot.com/

My Lung Cancer Odyssey @ http://lung-cancer-survivor.blogspot.com/