Radiotherapy finished!

I finished the radiotherapy course this morning, and was presented with this:

So that's the radiotherapy part over, unless we go back again somewhere down the line to have a go at the lesion on my rib, behind the right shoulder-blade. That seems to be the next largest and it did cause me a lot of pain some time ago, although it's calmed down more recently. All depends on how well it responds to the chemotherapy.

I think I should explain that the radiotherapy was not intended to "cure" my cancer. For a start, the cancer is in my bone marrow, not in any particular part of the bone itself. One of the effects of the cancer is to mess up the chemistry of the balance  between bone-building cells and bone-destroying ones, so that "lesions" can appear where bone is being destroyed and de-mineralised faster than it's being replaced. That can lead to a "tumour" of spongy not-quite-bone tissue which, in my case, was pushing into the hip joint and badly (and painfully) affecting the function of the joint. It's not a "tumour" in the usual cancer sense - the cells that make it up are not cancerous.

The aim of the radiotherapy was to shrink that tumour and thereby improve the function of my hip joint, reducing the pain and improving the walking. That appears to have worked. It's the chemotherapy (still to come in full, although the steroids I've been taking are a part of it) that will actually attack the cancerous plasma cells in my bone marrow and hopefully kill them.

We've been able to get the radiotherapy in first before the chemo because my blood numbers are still good or improving, so there's nothing lost by delaying it for a couple of weeks, and the steroids have brought the paraprotein levels down.

This symptomatic radiotherapy is called "palliative" - a term people associate with end-of-life care where the sole purpose is to reduce the symptoms and pain levels in the terminal stage of cancer. Don't panic - I'm not there yet! This was just intended to improve my walking, and it has done. The main problem now is that it still tends to tire and get difficult again after quite a short distance, although today we did what we call the "short" walk in Admiral's Park to the cafe for coffee and half a toasted teacake each before going round the lake and back to the car park. That was OK, but I felt I was getting close to the limit. And that fancy new walker does make a huge difference.

And BTW, no Eggs Benedict on the menu!