day 2

Jeff is already 2 days down into his 6 weeks radiation journey. He started on thursday by going to a class about what to expect when receiving radiation treatment. It was very informative and a little overwhelming to hear how many people are being treated at the cross everyday. After Jeff's class, he got to experience the whole radiation thing first hand. The actual treatment only takes a couple of minutes and the radiation techs have things running rather smoothly. On day 2, I was able to see exactly what they do and even snap a few shots while I was in there. The mask over his face is purely for immobilization and positioning purposes. It is fairly tight and he comes out with a honeycomb face after, for a few minutes at least. The green laser lights are there to position him and they line up with the marks on the mask. After he is positioned they take an x-ray to double check his positioning. He is placed in the EXACT position he was in during his planning scan. This is to ensure the highest amounts of radiation are deposited into the tumour and only the tumour. Once things are all lined up, they start up the machine. The tech explained that the radiation is kind of like leaving an x-ray on for too long and Jeff feels nothing during the treatment. The actual radiation is on for 1- maybe 2 minutes each day. Since it takes about 2 weeks for it to build in your system, the doctors say symptoms usually start around then. A lot of people have been asking us about symptoms and its actually something we have been trying not to think about. We know what could happen but its not super helpful to talk about all the horrible possibilities. Jeff has a great team looking out for him and if problems arise, they know how to deal with them. It is expected that if symptoms arise, they will continue to worsen until about 7-10 days after his final treatment at which point they will peak and we should start to see some improvement. The hope for these treatments is that at the end of 6 weeks, his scans will show complete removal of the cancerous parts of the tumour.