My appointment yesterday with the Oncology team that will be handling my case went well. It was longer than I had anticipated as they really dig deep into your medical history. They also gave me information of how to access the online communication tool called MyChart. It's a way both patient & medical team can communicate between visits and for the administrators to communicate upcoming appointment details.
Most of the time was spent with the nurse detailing my entire medical history then I had to wait awhile for the Doctor. He came in and basically said he agreed with the pulmonogist at the lung clinic that radiation treatment would be the best route for my situation and would have the least impact in terms of side effects etc. He then explained the process and reviewed possible side effects I might experience as a result of the treatment; the most common one being acute exhaustion. There were a number of others as well, just like there are when we quit smoking. There's plenty of possible symptoms we may experience when we quit but we don't experience them all normally.
The next steps are; I will be contacted with an appointment date for what they call a "mapping session". This is a process where they will map on my chest exactly where the cancerous nodule is in my upper left lung that they want to zap with eacch radiation session. They will apparently use a number of precise measurements that will be fed into the radiation gizmo so it knows where to zap me. It will result in a series of three tatoos on me. One on each side and one in the center of my chest. After that's done they will schedule 10 sessions of radiation for me over roughly a month's time. They schedule each session a few days apart so the patient has time to recover before the next session in case they're experiencing negative effects. Each session will be about 30 mins. but only about 10 mins of that time will be actually getting zapped. I guess the balance of the time is ensuring they're zapping the correct spot? The Doc said he's pretty confident these sessions will do the trick in ridding me of this issue (75-80% was his guess). He also said he wanted to schedule a brain MIR for me at some point. That surprised me so I asked the reason for that. He said just a precaution and to establish a base starting point in case anything changed in future. He explained that often people with lung cancer find that it spreads to the brain. He said it would not at all be likely in my case but they want to just make sure of that and have that as part of my future medical file.
So, now waiting to hear when my "mapping" appointment will be. All the appointments will be in this same town that's about a 45 minute drive from where I live. No big deal I just hope they schedule my appointments around rush hour times because there's only 1 main highway that goes there and it will be jammed at rush hour times.
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