Turns out
the mask doesn't look a lot like me. True, he's a handsome devil, but there the
resemblance ends. Of course, I'm not made of white plastic mesh, at least not
extensively, which may have something to do with that.
It fits
though. Boy, does it fit - as I found out as it was used to clamp me to a CT
scanner table today: like a glove, if a face-glove is a thing. It is very
tight, to the extent that my eyes felt like they were trying to escape backwards
into my head, but given that it's designed to stop me moving during
radiotherapy and thus hearing things like "aim, fire… shit, missed"
from the people aiming the death-ray into my skull, that's good.
Today was a
day of scans, one CT (clamped down, quick) and one MRI (claustrophobic and bangy,
but weirdly and hypnotically relaxing), but that's OK, I'm going to have to get
used to them. They're going to be a routine feature of life from now on,
ideally equally routinely followed by the words, "nope, nothing
there".
I've also
signed up for a clinical trial. It's experimental and there is no way of
knowing if it will help me in any way at all. But it's in addition to the gold
standard treatment I'll be getting anyway and has no effect on that, and it can
only work in the 40% of the population which, like me, has a particular genetic
marker, so it would seem churlish not to. Plus, you never know.
The trial
is for a vaccine, delivered along with an immune system stimulator, which might
be useful in treating glioblastoma. It means quite a few more visits to the
Beatson, but I'm planning on spending quite a lot of time up there anyway. It
also seems to involve giving quite a lot of blood samples and a number of
injections delivered intradermally, which seems to be a method of jabbing one
with needles which has been thought through for maximum discomfort. But having
various bits of ironmongery shoved into me (usually accompanied by a muttered,
"I'm sure there was a vein there" or words to that effect) has become
a bit of a fixture of late, so what the hell.
It is going
to keep me busy over Christmas, though. I had rather been looking forward to
the idea that, after today, I wasn't going to have to go near a hospital until
early January. But with this I'm already booked up for much of next week and
the week between the holidays. Still, I'm allowed to drink, so the seasonal
social whirl will otherwise go as planned.
I'm also
going to ask about a red nose or maybe antlers for the orfit. Might as well
keep things festive.
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