Last night we had a big storm. I live on the South coast in a small city, and our large hospital is about 5 miles away by car, about half by motorway. I left home shortly after 8am for a 9am appointment, conscious it was rush hour. It didn’t take me long to find the city was gridlocked. I eventually got to the hospital at 9:40, having called to say I was having difficulty getting there. Thankfully they were still able to see me.
The radiotherapy department shares a waiting room with oncology, so I got to sit on the other side of it for the first time. When taken through, I was first taken to an office to have the procedure explained to me and to confirm consent. The planning tattoos had been a big issue for me so I talked this through with the technician. If I refused them, I would get stickers applied over the marks. There were two issues with this - one being that my radiotherapy is the week beginning 21st November so they probably wouldn’t last that long, and the second being I often react to the glue on plasters and the like. As one of the marks would be in my cleavage, I couldn’t see this working from either perspective. After a fruitless discussion about alternative ink, and reassurance they wouldn’t be bigger than a freckle, I decided I would just have to accept them.
Then I went into a room with yet another CT scanner. 4 technicians - 2 women, 2 men. I lay on the bed with a support under my head and a support under my knee. They decided I couldn’t get my left arm into the right position, so that one was left by my side with another support under it. Then they adjusted the tilt in various ways. I have large (36HH) breasts, so lying on my back makes them drop down outside my frame. They were worried about areas where skin would touch skin, as these are the areas where you are more likely to get burns. So they tried me wearing a bra (fortunately I had worn a sports bra). Whilst this solved the overhang problem, it created two new problems. Breasts touching together, and breast tissue too close to my chin. So we went back to being topless.
A couple of marks were drawn on me, more measurements, recordings and photographs were taken, and then I went into the scanner so they could set up the simulation. There were a few laser lines here and there, and the scanner’s innards whizzed around making a noise like an aeroplane taking off. Once they were happy, the technician I had first seen arrived to make the dots permanent, and kept good to his word to make them as tiny as possible. So I have acquired 2 small blue-grey freckles, one deep in my cleavage and one on my right side. I hope I will be ok with this and that it will be one step further forward in ridding me of my tattoo phobia, as well as a step forward in my treatment. I will never use the T word to describe them, they are just freckles. I have forced myself to look at them and touch them. They really are very small.
