she stayed to spend the night here last night since my wife, Michelle, went
home to be with the boys. I didn't sleep too well last night. Just
restless and needed to go to the bathroom a lot. I am certainly hydrated. I
will be taking a nap. Enjoyed visits from my friends Kirk and Jeff
yesterday. Good
friends do so much to keep me up. I am given several different pills each day. Most are various antibiotics such as bactrim to
knock out any kind of infection which may be lingering. I am getting a
Hickman Port today. It's an IV that goes into your chest and into the
Superior Vena Cava (large vein going into heart). They will use this port to
take blood tests, give me fluids, transfusions of blood, and even my bone
marrow cells. They even said they can feed me through it. It should be
interesting watching them stuff a piece of pizza through that port. They
will take me to the operating room to put in the port and will give me a drug
called Verced which will relax me and make it so I don't care about what they
are doing. Most likely I won't remember the procedure. Learned a little
more about radiation today. The radiation I am getting is electrically
generated. Electrons are accelerated through the radiation machine and the
machine converts the electrons into radioactive waves sending out
photons (particles of energy) which penetrate right through me into the wall.
There is another radiation room near mine which has a nine foot thick door.
The device is three times as big as the one they use on me and it shoots
neutrons instead of photons. This device uses 1/3 of the hospitals daily
power. Different types of radiation for different cancers. Old radiation
equipment used cobalt. Cobalt is a radioactive substance which was kept in a
lead box inside the machine and when you were radiated the box was opened so
radioactive particles could penetrate you and treat the cancer. One problem
with using cobalt is that it decays over time, so as the machine got older,
lets say 5-8 years, the cobalt would be much weaker and treatments would take
a lot more time. I guess many third world countries still use cobalt
radiation. Radiation in general is very effective in killing many types of
cancer cells, but it also kills normal body cells as well...including bone
marrow. The death of normal body cells is why you get so tired and why you
need new bone marrow (stem) cells to replace the cells destroyed through
radiation and chemotherapy. Half of my TBI (total body irradiation) has me
facing a wall. I place a picture of Michelle and my boys on the wall and
focus on it. As I look at my boys' picture, it triggers so many great memories with
them and as I look more deeply I feel them with me. This gives me strength.
I thank all of you who have emailed me messages of encouragement, support,
and prayer. I love reading them. Most likely I won't be able to respond to
all of my emails. If not, please know they are making a huge difference...so
keep them coming.