Underwear underestimate

Yesterday we stayed overnight unexpectedly, but there is a Filene's basement next door to the hospital so we simply purchased cheap t-shirts and some underwear for the night. Robin bought a three pack of jockeys and she got me one pair of Calvin Klein's - woohoo!

Today Robin's appointments are running late. At this moment she is strapped into a Varian Radiation Therapy simulator machine. It's just like the radiation therapy machine but it doesn’t have the radiation guns. They're doing "planning" with the neutered machine!

When it comes to actual radiation exposure (in about three weeks) the actual machine will focus on the area in-and-around the tumor, but it will also hit good cells in Robin's body (the radiation treatment version of "friendly fire"). The good news is that healthy cells recover comparatively pretty well from this exposure. The cancer cells however don't adjust well to radiation, so over time their numbers will be reduced. In combination with chemo this should eventually lead to a significant reduction in the tumor size. Sometimes by the time they get to the actual surgery they can't even find tumor cells in the body. We'll see how effective the radiation therapy is when the actual treatment starts in 2 to 3 weeks.

Lo and behold they let us know that because they are running late today we may need to come back tomorrow to finish up (this does not even surprise us anymore). I guess I should have invested in a 3-pack of jockeys rather than a single pair of CKs! :)

(5:48 update - they finished everything and we're going home tonight!)