When I was girl growing up in the 50s, we used to read about how atomic energy would make electricity so cheap they wouldn't bother billing people - it was going to be free. We'd all have little personal helicopters and live in plastic houses under the sea.
And "they" would have found a cure for cancer.
My granny died of breast cancer in 1955, when I was 11. She had a terrible time of it, I guess. Once she showed me what The Cobalt Bomb had done to her - from the waist to her shoulders she looked like a burn victim, her skin red, raw, puckered, scarred from the mastectomies and the crude radiation treatments. There was no chemo then, not that I ever heard of.
I know from my own radiation treatments in 2005 that the cobalt bomb is a thing of the past. I had 42 sessions of radiation over 8 weeks or so and all I got was a pair of tiny tattooes and a slight tan on the affected breast. I also got cured.
My husband will be getting 5 radiation treatments on his back/lumbar region where the pain is the most severe. The radiologist said it would almost certainly relieve the pain by shrinking the cancer, killing cancer cells. I was so afraid they would say the words "palliative care" but they said the word "treatment" and so we are feeling somewhat relieved.
This doctor was puzzled by the quick and sharp increase in my husband's PSA, but he stopped short of saying it never happens. It does, obviously. However, my husband will be staying on the Lupron unless the chemo doctors decide against it - which the radiologist thought was unlikely. He also said that there would be more tests, of course. I sort of liked to imagine that the PSA was wrong - that someone made a mistake. Doubtful, though.
So, onward and upward.
