Post 6: The Sunbed

These are the photos from my recent “sunbed sessions” – well, that’s how I ‘spun’ the radiotherapy to a more positive term for my family and friends. I’d be “off work to go to the sunbed”, that sort of thing. Totally made light of it, but everyone got the gist.

The burns in the photos are from the worst of it, which took about 5 to 6 weeks to fully develop, and probably the same to fade out. But the redness shows the complete area of the lump plus a 3cm ‘margin’ around it that the radiation affected, including under my right arm.

The hair on my chest in that area took a few weeks to start falling out and is now almost completely gone. With that, and the moisturiser I’ve been using daily, it feels as soft as a baby’s bum!

I had 25x sunbed sessions in total, 5x times a week, for 5x weeks, so Monday to Friday, with weekends off. Because of the various bank holidays, I’d have to have catchup sessions occasionally, and have two in one day, (which had to be a min of 6 hrs apart), but mostly they were morning appointments. Then, once I was done, I’d go back to work and do the same again the next day.

In total, my appointments were only 15 mins each, but only actually about 4 or 5 mins to do both a mini-CT scan and then the radiotherapy treatment each time. Both were completely painless and mostly silent, except for the sounds of the £2M+ laser machine whirring behind and all around me.

I’d have to lay there on my back, perfectly still, and in a specific ‘pose’ (as set by the doctor and the radiologists during my first meeting with them), which maximised the angles and surface area for the laser-guided machine to circle around my head/chest and blast only the targeted areas. 20,000 laser red-dot targets covered my chest at all times, which is how the machine knew exactly where to shoot. If I were to move even an inch, the machine would know and instantly shut down. I didn’t try this, but I REALLY WANTED TO!

None of this is what I expected. I knew NOTHING about radiotherapy beforehand, to the point that I assumed that I would feel something akin to broken glass being dragged across my skin or something awful like that.

#sarcoma #radiotherapy #rt #radiationburns