Praetor

It was a long and tiring road. Along this road we use generally descriptive terms, cancer, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, but that does not do justice to what it entails.

We discovered that cancer isn’t just cancer. You get different types, with different degrees of strength. The chemotherapy is adjusted according to the type and strength of the cancer. The frequency and volume of the chemotherapy differs from person to person.

At last the last round of tests were done to see if the chemotherapy did its job. Sonar, clear; x-rays, clear; mammogram and sonar, clear; bone scan, clear. You would think this is the end of the road, but no, more is still to come.

The size and tissue of the tumour is also a factor. All in all my wife’s situation calls for further radiotherapy – a preventive treatment, because cancer has a stealthy way of spreading to other glands in the breast, neck, or to the bone structure or brain.

First of all they have to plan the treatment carefully. The radio treatment is indiscriminate – it destroys all in its path. They have to be careful to miss the heart and especially the lungs as much as possible. To do this they scan the chest once more and the doctor draws the areas to be treated with a black marker. At all the corners they apply a virtually invisible tattoo, which the radiotherapy machine picks up.

The radiotherapy is a dish-like machine, which moves around your body, not touching the body. The bed also moves around, up and own, swivelling around, but fortunately it does not tilt. This is like space travel. The machine and bed is computer controlled, calling out the instructions to get the angles and depth of penetration just right. It does so in my mother tongue (Afrikaans), mind you.

There is another little secret, a rather important one. They place a 2cm thick pad on your chest over the area that needs to be treated. It has a dark mustard colour, and is hard. They pace it on a small towel. The purpose of this pad is to absorb the radio rays so that the rays only penetrate about one centimetre under the skin. Without it the rays will penetrate two and a half centimetres, which will reach the underlying organs.

You have to face this for six weeks, five days per week for about twenty minutes per treatment. But it is not too bad. You lay topless in a nice heated theatre. Initially nothing is visible and no serious after-effects. Later it feels like a suntan gone wrong, still later it becomes somewhat painful.

We are thankful to the Lord Jesus Christ for undertaking, carrying and encouraging us on this road. We are grateful for everybody that has prayed for us. The long tiring road has been short and not so tiring.