Surviving Brain Cancer in a Precarious World

Part 11: ELM

On the day of my first radiotherapy session, both my Fiancée and mother came with me. It was another very cold winter Monday morning and on the way into Clatterbridge, I felt even more intimidated just by the sight of the building against a gloomy winter backdrop.

I remember there was a lot of adrenaline pumping because I had lots of paperwork to sort out at the desk and I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking. I felt physically sick as we went deeper into the hospital than before, down to a vast corridor/waiting area. A nurse was guiding us down to the closest waiting area for the machine I would be put on. Every machine in the building was named after different types of tree. We were directed to the furthest one which was called ELM.

The waiting area was extremely busy so my Mother had to sit in a row behind me and my Fiancée until there was more room. Like when we were leaving the first time, there was a several hour wait until they were ready for me.
It was such a long wait that it had gone beyond the point of it being a useful wait for my nerves to settle. I just felt bad for my Mother and Fiancée who had to endure the wait with me.

Halfway through I was called up but it turned out to just be so I could have my weight measured and to see a specialist nurse about my treatment and what financial help I could claim for as a cancer patient.

I chose not to claim anything as the plan was I would work from home at the grace and trust of my employer. The department I work in is close knit so I was given plenty of contact from my friends at work who had been sporadically sending incredibly kind words of support to me ever since Christmas.

My boss in particular was already planning to visit me. It was their support as a company and as friends that really blew me away and of course with my family were in unison stopping me from losing my mind. As one of the older members in my department, I had worked in a varied range of fields before I was blessed with a career as a 3D artist with them.

This made me acutely aware how lucky I was to have a job I love and to not just have a friend as a boss but very much a father figure who knew how to be exactly that, and at the same time, making sure no one’s taking the piss or taking advantage of his patient and nurturing style of leadership.

When the time finally came for me to go through for my first radiotherapy session I was thrown back into the adrenaline for dealing with the unknown. That was until they told me to wait again but this time in the private waiting rooms within the machines control room.

This was because a patient was still on the machine having the last of their treatment being done. My loved ones were able to wait in this area with me and they could tell I was struggling to contain my emotions and fear. It just felt like a no going back scenario where I had no idea if it would work on the cancer and simply leave me with unbearable side effects.

When they came in to bring me to the machine I had to go past a prospects gate with lots of radiation warning signs dotted around. The small corridor between the control room and the machine snaked a bit before I saw ELM. It was a newly installed Varian Edge radiotherapy machine.

I had read some days before that it had the ability to use a very specific type of precision on tumours but I learned on the day from the staff operating it that it was never used because they couldn’t find a surgeon who was up for putting in anode markers on tumours when resecting. The website made no mention that this specific mode relied on surgery beforehand.

This frightened me because it meant every week the machine would have to do a pre-treatment CAT scan to make sure it was lined up correctly as treatment progressed. I wasn’t happy about this because CAT scans also blast you with harmful radiation much like a general X-ray machine.

One thing that I made sure of to prepare for was to bring music with me as they offer to play it during your treatment to help patients relax. My choice was an album called Ariel’s by an experimental band called Bent. I chose this album because it’s the most chilled out music I’ve ever heard and the hope was it would help me meditate.

Once on the machine table, I had the mask from the moulding the week before, put in place over me. This time I could breathe easy because of the net structure but they clamp it down very tight which can make it fairly uncomfortable.
Luckily I’m not really claustrophobic or I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been. Once they had made some adjustments to the bed height and position, they left the room for the CAT scan to start. The music started and then this initial scan went on for about 3 minutes. Then the actual radiation started.

I couldn’t feel anything from it apart from the strange buzzing sounds from the machine as it rotated around me. The outlet for the beams changed shape as it moved in order to make sure only the shape of the exact treatment area was being bombarded with x-rays.

This took about 5 minutes and I had only just got to the second song on my requested album. When the machine was done I had to wait for the team to come back in and unstrap my mask. They helped me up to my feet and handed me my album back.

On the way out I had a hug with my loved ones and we headed off to the taxi waiting area again. They noticed that my face was covered with print marks from where the mask had been really tight on my face. I was relieved the first experience of it was out of the way but it felt really daunting that I had another 32 sessions to get through every weekday for a month and a few days.

To be continued…