03-08-19
I started losing my hair already; we did not see this coming. Totally unexpected and quite early. My mother and I thought it would be nice to have a hair-wash-day, but that turned out into something else. Hair kept falling from my head up to a point that it became so much that we both started crying. Just the hair on the back of my head can’t be that much right? I am confused and don’t know how to cope with this. How should I act on this? It seems I’m losing all of my hair but wouldn’t that happen much later?! What a mess.
But in general I am able to deal with it a lot better than I dared to expect. That is because since the first chemo that I had (two and half years ago) I always took into account that I could lose my hair someday and this is the third time that I received radiation treatment already. For now it is only the back of my head but everybody knows that I have a lot of hair. It was quite shocking.
05-08-19
I’m feeling happy. Today I had my last radiation treatment and what a day it was. My best friend just came back from holiday so I immediately dragged her along to the hospital. Amazing to see her again of course! I was already happy to go to the radiation treatment, purely to get it over, so imagine when your best friend joins as well! At home I had a cheeky piece of cake because this had to be celebrated. It feels good to close another chapter. Yesterday and today I improved a lot and if I keep going like this I expect to be back in the gym in about two weeks. But, we can’t move beyond the facts just yet. Three to four weeks of side effects are yet to come from the radiation treatment. There are also positive side effects from the treatment, such as getting functions in my body back, which is happening already. Today at the radiation treatment I thought it would be nice to take a picture to close this chapter, but I wanted to do this while sitting. While I was getting up to sit I thought “why is she pushing that hard?”, because someone was helping me. But that was not case: I was doing it by myself! Haha, I was in total shock but if felt great! The picture turned out good and I took my radiation mask home. So far the negative side effects of the radiation treatment are: painful esophagus, hair loss (the bald skin feels burned as well), itching neck and a very swollen face. We shall see how long it takes but in the meantime, the radiation machine cannot bully my head any longer!
