We are back from our blog hiatus, but from here on out I’m intending to go to a 3 days a week schedule, posting on Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays. 5 days a week for the last 6 months was fun, but it started to feel a little forced to me at times, so we’re going to try 3 days a week for a while.

NOW, lets talk about Radiation:

Much has happened over the last two weeks in regards to the next stage of my treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma. But in order to make the next couple of weeks make sense, we all have to learn a bit of new vocabulary.

In the United States, radiation is talked about in units called “Gray.” Just like the rest of our units of measurements, we like to go our own way. We use Gray and the rest of the world uses Sieverts. That’s just how we roll. To quote Grandpa Simpson “The metric system is the tool of the Devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it.”

Newspaper clipping of Abe Simpson

When we first started talking about Radiation with my original oncologist, she told us that we could expect 4 weeks of daily radiation treatments. During the course of a 4 week treatment a patient would receive a total of 40 Gray of radiation. Treatments are every day M-F and during course of 5 days a total of 10 Gray are given.

A fun fact: A full body exposure of 5 Gray in a single dose at once is fatal. SO it’s important to note that when given medically for the treatment of cancer, we are usually talking about 2 Gray of radiation given at a time via extremely focused beams, delivered to precise areas of the body. In my case it would be the tumor (or ex-tumor) in my chest, as well as a few of the cancerous (or ex-cancerous) lymph-nodes in my neck and chest.

Typically, the point of these daily doses of radiation is to kill and shrink tumors. With some form of cancers radiation can be more effective than chemotherapy and is the primary form of treatment. With many more cancers its used in conjunction with chemotherapy. In my case it seems that it is being considered as a preventative measure.

Basically (and this is the doctor’s words, not mine) I had “a beautiful response to chemotherapy.” It worked. It worked well. And in fact after looking at my charts, and the before and after PT Scans, it seems that it worked even better than he would have expected it to. But, as I’ve stated before, we’re not out the woods yet. There is still a chance that there are lingering cancer cells that were not entirely killed of by chemo. These cells (should they exist) could have the potential to spark a relapse.

Relapsing would be bad. Not to be a Debby Downer, but the chances of “long-term survival” are greatly reduced when a Hodgkin’s patient relapses. And evidence suggests that chemotherapy is often not as successful the second time if a patient has relapsed. Obviously, this is something we’d like to avoid. So radiation is often used in patients such as myself who had advanced stages of Hogkins (Stage III or Stage IV, like I had) and/or patients who have tumors larger than 5 cm (the large one in my chest was about 6cm). The idea is that the radiation penetrates the tumors throughout and kills any lingering cancer cells that may have escaped the clutches of the initial chemotherapy treatment.

Looking at that, you’d think “Why wouldn’t you do radiation? You don’t want to relapse do you?” Well, there’s another side to it. The side-effects of radiation. I’ll get into the immediate side-effects (fatigue, irritated organs, skin damage) later, what we were worried are the long term side effects. The increased chance of the “other cancers” that radiation can cause, or as the doctors call them: secondary malignancies. Good times. More on those later =)

Over the course of the next few posts I’ll go into further details and bring everyone up to speed on how it’s going to work and what’s happened so far. But for now I’ll just leave you with fact that we’ve decided to do it, and we’ll be starting at some point in the next 2-3 weeks. There is a lot that goes into the preparation and creation of a treatment plan, and we’ll let you know how it all unfolds (or how it unfolded)

I’ll get into it more on Wednesday.
‘Till then!

(side note: There has been much talk in the media about radiation and radiation exposure due to the ever worsening conditions in Japan. Here is an interesting chart that’s been circulating the internet. It was put together by the man who does the webcomic XKCD and puts some general radiation doses into perspective)