Starting Monday, Cindy shows up each
weekday at 8:30 in the Radiation office, scans her barcode to alert the
radiation wallahs that she is in the waiting room, gets a mini-bottle of water
and sits down to read until she is summoned to the inner sanctum. This is on the ground floor of the Reston
hospital complex, the better to house heavy metal devices. In preparation for this, Cindy previously underwent
a procedure to produce a plastic radiation mask molded to her head.
The daily drill includes removing
any garments that might have metal near her head or neck, getting into a
hospital smock and being placed in a precise position with respect to the
radiotherapy machine. Placement in a
precise position is crucial so the machine can radiate the exact areas targeted
on the patient each day without having to do daily calibrations. And that’s a euphemism for being strapped to
the platform and, in Cindy’s head and neck treatment, having the radiation mask
placed over her face and affixed to the said platform.
The radiation itself takes about ten
minutes; the setting up and breaking down takes another 20, so the whole
process from scanning in to departing may be an hour. She typically doesn’t get a lot of reading
done.