Tomorrow will be my last radiation treatment – yay. So far I’ve managed without too much skin irritation (yay again). The doctor did mention that things could get worse or better over the next couple of weeks, but within a month I should be fully recovered skin wise as well as internally, which affects fatigue. She cautioned that it will take time to rebuild my stamina, but that is no different than any other insult to the body.

In case you are wondering, this is what the machine looks like. I lay down in it with my hands over my head in the arm rests. The radiation techs align my tattoos with the various green lines in the room. The machine goes around me, first doing a scan, and then when they are sure things are lined up, it goes around again giving me radiation. For radiation, it is starts at about the back of my shoulder (shoulder blade) and then goes around to my neck, then back down again (so two passes). Then it is done. The whole process takes about 10 minutes, with about 7 of those minutes being the techs lining me up perfectly.

I’m glad that it will all be done. In the US, when radiation treatment is finished you get to “ring the bell”. That isn’t a thing here. Instead I decided that eating cake was appropriate – but then in conversation with a neighbour we realized that lots of people in the community have bells – so I invited people for cake and encouraged them to bring a bell – so I could ring many different bells.

What I really enjoyed the last weekend I was home was all the short visits I had with my friends and neighbours. I got to see many different people and catch up on how they were doing. It was something I really missed during chemo when I was mostly staying away from people. The extrovert in me was very happy for all the visits. I’m looking forward to continuing that.

Now I get to spend a month or two healing before we start talking about the next phase of treatment. I’m still doing Herceptin (denosumab) every three weeks. That will continue until the fall. The next phase is hormone therapy, which I’m not looking forward to, but I’m also not really thinking about. I get to have two months of no additional treatments to recover from chemo and radiation. I plan to take that time to get back to regular beach visits or hikes with my puppy who I cannot wait to snuggle with when I get home tomorrow.