Hallelujah!

For those of you following my cancer adventure, there was big news this past week: something regarding my medical care worked.

I’ve been trying for months (since last December) to get recommended treatment from a brachytherapist, and one thing or another always blocked my progress. And….I was trying to accomplish this without the help of my radiation oncologist, who highly recommended brachytherapy and kept saying there should be NO BREAK in my treatment, but also couldn’t figure out how to complete this step. (Nor could she figure out how to get my records to my oncologist, but that’s another issue, and has finally been resolved.)

HOWEVER! Finally, finally, finally, I ended up at the UC-Irvine Health Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center (whew…) yesterday, and saw a real, intelligent, compassionate person who claimed they were a brachy doc.

First, her assistant (an adorable youngster named Justin) talked to me for about thirty minutes, getting my history and allowing me to tell my sad story. He also said he had read about my son, who plays in the Baltimore Symphony! How….? Anyway, he had obviously done more than his homework on me and my background.

Then another woman came in and explained the timing and icky bladder/bowel requirements for getting brachytherapy (one full, the other completely empty) as well as how to communicate effectively with my doctor over their app (hooray! whataconcept).

And then…..an actual brachytherapist entered the room.

She, too, was amazed at what I had been through. As we went over my timeline, she said it was not a good sign to still be having the light spotting I was experiencing, so that was troubling. She also said with the kind of endometrial cancer I had, that the hysterectomy should have eradicated it, so cancer cells showing up after that was also not what the doctors generally expect to see.

She did both an internal touch and visual exam, and said that there was nothing there that she could feel or see that was out of the ordinary, but that didn’t mean that the cancer hadn’t traveled beyond what’s called the vaginal cuff. So, she recommended the lightest treatment: two per week for two weeks. No hospital stay will be necessary, and they will first do an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), a medical imaging technique that uses strong magnetic fields and radio waves to create detailed images of the inside of the body.

For the treatment, a payload of high dosage radioactive pellets is placed near where any suspected cancer cells may be camping out, and left in for a short amount of time (a few minutes). In my case, I will have that treatment four times, and should have no aftereffects. It is recommended that I stay away from young children, so I won’t be able to see my twenty-one month old grandson for that period, since I will actually be carrying around trace amounts of radioactivity.

I was surprised to find out that brachytherapy has been used on cancer since the discovery of radium around the turn of the last century (1898). Originally found to be effective with prostate cancer, its usage has expanded over time. Its application has grown over the last century, but is declining somewhat because external beam radiation (a treatment I had last year) is becoming so effective in targeting some cancers.

Since my visit, sleep has returned. Not one to ever have trouble in that department, I was struggling to stay asleep for an entire night. Here’s hoping my cancer saga will soon be behind me. I have a lot of living still to do.