saved by gamma light
hey y'all... i made it thru the gamma knife procedure without any problems.
i'm not really claustrophobic in any way, but i do get a little bit antsy at being restrained (because my brothers loved to torture me by sitting on my feet when i was little, i'm sure). so the first thing they did was to give me a xanax which helped quite a bit.
after complaining (jokingly) about how big my head is and that i have the neck of a frog, the neurosurgeon and radiation oncologist fitted a frame onto my head. even though they applied numbing cream and lidocaine shots to the attachment points, it still hurt like crazy and felt like my head was in a vice (which i suppose it was). it boggles my my mind that the craniotomy that left me with a five inch scar and a temporary fontanelle hurt way, way less than having this frame installed. the frame provided both precise registration and kept my noggin perfectly still during the procedures.
i had yet another MRI, but this one is at least an order of magnitude more accurate than a typical diagnostic MRI because they need that kind of precision to make sure they hit every last little bit of the melanoma. they also found two much smaller tumors with (yay for finding them, boo for having them). so they zapped 7 tumors and the area surrounding the ping pong ball they removed the week before. the zapping took around 3.5h or so and was completely painless. we were in by 630am and out by 230pm. not too bad for a one time dealio. i made an easy listening playlist to keep me calm while being pinned down. that and the xanax did the trick. i'll include the playlist in the comments. it was a real relief to get that damn frame off. and a much bigger relief that all that melanoma is now dying. and a much, much bigger relief to see carol at the end of the hard, but interesting day.
my big noggin and frog neck go back in a month to get PET and MRI scans to see how well the gamma knife worked. hopefully, this will have gotten it all, but if there's still some abnormal cellular activity going on, then it'll be on to a low dose of melanoma immunotherapy; and i'll be fine with that.
i'll be seeing a medical oncologist soon, and they'll probably want to take a closer look at the one spot in my lung that was originally characterized granuloma. a granuloma is a benign kind of calcification that most people have and they're only discovered incidentally when getting an x-ray for something else. they're usually noted and ignored because they're not dangerous and there's nothing to do about them, but because of my current history, they have to cross the t's and dot the i's. similar situation with the two "hypodensities" that showed up in the ct scan of my liver. either way, i'm not sweating either of these until someone gives me a reason to.
in the photos, i'm doing my best to look like darth vader without his helmet from the empire strikes back; somebody else pointed out that the frame looks a bit like the bottom of the helmet from the original battlestar galactica, which it does. . the blue in the gecko represents the cobalt-60 radiation source.
finally, i have to tell you about this dream i had last week. it'd be an understatement to say i've been having weird-o-rama dreams lately. in this one, i was in our basement, fighting with a big blob of cancer. marsellus wallace was standing behind me, he had the word "gamma" in his hand, and it was shaped like a giant knife. he said "step aside lantz." i woke up laughing. so not only do i have an army of people pulling for me and medical professionals working on me, i've even got marsellus on my side. and, yesterday, we all collectively got medieval on some melanomas (in the most high tech way imaginable).
thanks for listening, y'all. this post was brought to you by the letter L and the number 2. L for all the love i've felt, over the past few weeks and over a whole lifetime. and 2 for the two hands i used to type this message (slower and more mistakes than normal, but this hand is getting back to normal).
the adventure continues.
