Breast Cancer

I’ve been telling Donna she looks great with the hair she has for a couple weeks now. The last time we went in for haircuts, when the stylist was evening her hair out, she told her that she looked great and should go for it. But her hair was still shorter than it was when we cut it all off back in May and she wasn’t feeling comfortable with it yet. I thought for sure she was going to keep it covered up until it was as long as before, which would be still another couple months, but today, out of the blue, Donna decided to go sans bandanna/scarf/headdress.

She got one or two double takes, a lot of compliments and even a couple hugs. But mostly she got a lot of people wanting to feel her hair. It is different than before that’s for sure, it is softer, a little darker, a lot more gray and way more curly. People say the tight curls are temporary and eventually your hair returns to its pre-chemo shape, I’ll let you know…

Today I got to see first hand what those four little cross-hairs that are stuck on Donna’s chest are for. She asked the techs yesterday if it was OK to bring me in and watch a treatment so I would know what was happening and they said OK. Plus then I could describe the process to her, because she has to remove her glasses and then can’t really tell what is going on.

Upon arrival she goes into a changing room to swap her upper clothes for a hospital gown. After a short wait Donna gets called back into the treatment room where she lays on the a table that has her personalized molded foam pad on it. The pads are blue and everyone’s is hanging on a rack on the left side of the room like so many overcoats in a hat check room. The pad is probably the same technology as used in the custom seats F1 drivers use. At work we use something similar for packing things for shipping, a reaction between two chemicals in a bag makes a foam that expands to fit tightly around an object.

Once she is situated, they raise the table to shoulder height and move it into the center of the room. Here is where another familiar technology is used in a different manner. On two walls of the room are something resembling those fancy laser levels from Home Depot. Four bright green lines cross in the middle of the room and then Donna is inched and nudged so that these lines cross exactly through the cross-hair stickers on Donna’s torso. She is told to hold still and the tech leaves the room closing the one foot thick bank vault looking door behind her.

Outside two technicians sit watching two video monitors on their left showing the interior of the treatment room. On the right of their station are a couple of computer monitors that show what looks like a mainframe style terminal program (maybe DOS, but thankfully not Microsoft Windows) that controls the “ray gun.” I don’t know what else to call it, but it is nothing like you might imagine a ray gun in a James Bond or Flash Gordon movie to be. It is more like a giant doughnut cut in half or a big “C” surrounding the front of the table. One side has a little window in it where the focused radiation beam will exit. A simple mouse click and the treatment begins. The C-shape rotates a little, to get to the proper angle, so it is just hitting the breast and not any internal part of the body. Little numbers jump around on the monitors and 48 secs later it stops. Mouse click 2 sends the ray gun rotating 190 degrees on it’s axis, so the window is on the other side of Donna’s body aiming up and once again skimming the body and just blasting breast tissue. We countdown 48 more seconds, done.

The tech then opens the vault and calls in that they’re done. The table is retracted and lowered so Donna can hop off. Back to the dressing room to discard the gown and get redressed. The whole thing takes less than 15 minutes. Bye, see you tomorrow.

Only 29 more to go.

Every year ASCO has one of Augusta hospitals bring over their mobile mammogram unit. It isn’t free, but the company provides a $200 wellness benefit to offset most or all the cost of the test. Donna always goes to her doctor, but you can see where it might be popular for the hourly employees, they can get that little bit of diagnostics taken care of on company time, they don’t have to take vacation or an attendance point. Each year they get an average of 35 women to sign up.

This year, with Donna’s diagnosis, her openness to talk about her disease and vocal urging to people to get a mammogram, they have 74 sign-ups.

As far back as I can remember Donna and I have been getting our hair cut every 4 weeks. At the last one each year we sit down with the stylist’s appointment book and mapped out our haircut schedule for the coming year.

The other day I asked Donna was it time for our haircut soon as I thought that mine was getting a little shaggy. She looked in her little calendar and said, “Nope, we aren’t due until July 25th.” “Wow, that is nearly three weeks way,” I said, “my hair is getting long enough that I might have to start carrying that comb again.” That’s when she looked backwards and realized we were supposed to go on June 27th. We had missed an appointment. That was 4 days after chemo #4, so she wasn’t exactly paying attention to those mundane details. Besides, it is not like she noticed needing a haircut, she balder than a new born.

Although, Donna’s head has been itching something fierce and we could swear that some places that were smooth a week ago, so maybe the hair is starting to make a comeback.