Radiation, T8 & T9 "Involvement"

What the hell does T8 & T9 "Involvement" mean? All we knew was Dave had "lesions" on his spine and shoulder. Ok, so this explains the pain I guess. The solution was to handle it with radiation. Ok. Dave couldn't move, so an ambulance had to come to his room, get him from the bed to the gurney. This was harrowing. Seriously. Dave could hardly move. He was urinating in a jug to avoid getting out of bed. Watching him trying to get out of the bed and onto this gurney was painful and stressful. What happened! What happened to my Dave! Holy crap! Fussing around now with elevating his torso so that he could be wheeled out of the hospital was another 5 minutes as he was in so much pain. All of this so they could drive him .9 miles to the cancer center across the street to the tune of $1,000 for each trip and we had to do this for days! A simple skywalk would have done the trick and been a whole lot less than $1,000! Good grief! I know many of you understand how awful you feel when your loved one is sick and suffering and coupled with all of that is the COST! You feel sleezy to even have such thoughts, but they are there, they are the reality.

The good news, after the very first radiation treatment Dave could WALK on his own to the bathroom. He got up and shaved and brushed his teeth. It took a lot out of him, but he did it!

So we got 2 days of that and then they are closed for the weekend. That stinks. Slowly but surely his pain and muscle spasms returned over the weekend, not too mention we were BORED out of our gourds! By Monday he was begging for, yep, RADIATION! MORE RADIATION! Sad when you think about it. But it brought him such immediate relief.

Little did we know that this wonderful radiation would cause potential problems later with his stem cell collection...