September 20, 2011 
Radiation Treatment #1 (complete with red laser)
I had radiation treatment #1 today, with 35 more in queue each weekday afternoon through Nov 8. No side effects expected for the nonce.
It was easy and uneventful — well, uneventful to my eye. We’ll hope some little prostate cancer cells met an invisible and violent death, but that was nothing for me to see or even feel. The treatment itself involved radiation doses from nine different directions into a band around my pelvis. Ground zero was the prostate fossa, the area where my prostate resided until surgery.
“Lay still and breathe normally,” they told me as I lay on a hard table. The radiation machine circled my pelvis, and the therapists occasionally tweaked the positioning. Some kind of red laser beamed at me from the ceiling next to a sign that warned, Do Not Look at the Laser. All cut and dried, chop-chop. Except.
Except for the frisson, the palpable sensation I’d not had since surgery four years ago. You know how something can happen, and it just drives home and makes vivid the reality of a situation? Surgery drove home, italicized and put in bold my stark reality of 2007: I’ve got cancer, and that’s not good.
Same thing today at Radiation Oncology at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. I can’t remember whether today’s realization came while waiting for my first treatment or while talking to the guy waiting for his last; whether I was arranging the schedule for future treatments or was looking helplessly at the radiation machinery arrayed around me. But that old, familiar reality came back and drove itself home:
I’ve still got cancer, and that’s not good.
My First Cancer 
Keeping you in my thoughts. I’m with Brad – keep racking up the 4-years. Loved the writing and Becky’s photo! Cindy
At least you know you are doing all you can to get rid of that nasty C! We are sending positive vibes.!
Well, if you can’t rid yourself of it fast enough then go ahead and live another 4 years with it, then another four, then another four………
Brad, I cannot argue with your logic! It sounds like an excellent plan! B
I look at your post and I think: how did I spend today? Did I make good use of my *healthy* time, knowing that, at any minute, I could cross the line from healthy to — to having cancer, for example?
You’ve still got cancer, and you’re still fighting back and winning! Keep it up for the rest of us…