Back to the oncology department!

It's a warm fuzzy feeling when you know that the entire contents of your ribcage will soon get bitch-slapped by ionizing beams of death.. I guess that's why I had a doctor's appointment first so they could explain how they do it? Well, at least I thought it was supposed to be a brief reassuring chat but I ended up spending 3h there! At first I did go for a brief chat and of course the usual crap where they listen to your heart and lungs even though I had recently had both spirometry and heart sonography and know those are in great shape, but I guess they have to do something to earn the 30€ I spend for each doctors visit. There is no such thing as free medicare..!

Anyway, then I hear I'm supposed to get x-rayed, measured and prepped for the radiation too. (And naturally another visit the blood-lab.) So I wait outside the X-ray room for a good 20min until I get called into a big spacious room with about five people ready to take me on. First they lay me down on a moving bed with the usual doughnut-shaped x-ray machine but this room had four lasers in the roof measuring me up on the bed. The nurses rock me back and forth and keep drawing on me with markers until they get me in a good position. Suddenly they attack me with a wet, rubbery asphyxation blanket and strap it down to the bed. (Sort of like this one: Neck Fixation) Apparently they need to make sure my chin and head do not move one millimeter when the radiation starts. In very short time the blanket started to shrink and harden and really pull my face down towards the bed. That was total sci-fi stuff! =) Now they have a fixation device moulded in my image to strap me down exactly like I was. On top of that they tattooed four dots on me for where the laser pointers had been. So I didn't manage to stay untattooed for the rest of my life after all.. They will take about one week to calculate the radiation dose with some physics geeks and try a simulation run next friday. The real radiotherapy starts on Monday (22/10).

Here's a slightly better picture of the facemask: