No idea how many left...

I changed the look of things. Mainly out of boredom, but also because I remembered that I had that option. I still have plenty of energy, which is fantastic. I still have a cold, which sucks. I think I'll basically have some sort of cold until June or so. Max is a heck of a dreamer, wakes up screaming, screams in his sleep, etc. Its hard to get a good night's sleep with him around. I used to feel bad that he was having these traumatic nightmares, but then I heard him yelling things like last night, "no mommy, I don't want the cheese!" Yeah, not so traumatic. Brent is a very vivid dreamer, so apparently its inherited. I'm thinking by the time Max actually sleeps through the night, the radiation will have caught up with me, and that will be my reason for being exhausted. With the help of a lot of coffee, I'll live. I don't have any burning yet either, even though I over-analyze any skin sensation that I have. Monday on my drive home, I started to wonder if something was a sunburn-like feeling, then I realized it was the wrong side of my chest. Gifted.

We're on to puzzle #2 in the waiting area. The people that actually do the zapping are Calli & Tim most days. These are two incredibly nice people, as all of my nurses/doctors have been. They ask how school was, how are the students, can we see pictures of your kids, laugh at my lame jokes, and answer all of my questions. Basically, they humor me in the nicest most sincere way possible.

I have this x-ray machine rotating around me for the radiation, so I have a variety of questions about how that works. Here's what I've learned so far: There's a window in the rotating thing where the radiation comes through. Inside the window there are 120 "teeth" for lack of a better term, that move together and apart to help focus where the radiation is going. They block the radiation from hitting more area than we need to. They start out looking kind of like an unzipped zipper, then some of them move closer together, or farther apart depending on which part of the plan we're doing. I have about 6 different times that I get radiated, each lasting about 10 seconds? So basically, machine starts above me, buzzes about 5 seconds, rotates to the right a bit while the teeth things are moving around to target a different area, zaps again for a few seconds, rotates further, etc. After I think the third one, Calli comes on the intercom with "Melissa, please move your head to the right," and then we do the last three.

Fridays there's some sort of probe, ok that sounds bad, let's come up with a different term... yeah, I've got nothing, its a probe that gets taped to my chest in different locations. I don't quite understand this thing, but when the machine zaps me, the probe registers some numbers. The numbers tell the "team" whether or not we have the right amount of radiation. Tuesdays we have x-ray day where they take x-rays to make sure they are positioning me correctly. Wednesdays are doctor days where I meet with the radiation doctor and she checks my skin, energy level, blood counts, etc. I had to have blood drawn last week, and I'm kind of curious what the results will be as far as white blood cell count and iron level. I have a tendency to be anemic. They're checking to make sure things are accurate constantly. Its great. Oh, and every other day I wear the mold of my chest. Its called a bolus. I had to ask how to spell it yesterday, because its pronounced bullis. I think I mentioned on here before that they made the mold of my chest. I have that on my chest while they're radiating to bring the rays closer to the skin, where the lymph nodes are. I also asked yesterday when are the milkshake days, and apparently they don't have that in place yet.