Friday, December 16, 2011

Radiotherapy week 1

Lunar eclipse on 12/10/2011
Radiotherapy has been alright so far. It's better than chemotherapy for sure, but it's not a fun experience still. I wish all treatments are exciting in some way that it could reduce psychological stress on patients.

Each appointment of radiotherapy takes about 15 minutes, where the 1 minute is used for actually radiating my body, and rest of the time is spent for preparation of the machine. Fortunately, there has been no long waiting time involved for radiotherapy; radiology department knows how to schedule patients well :P

There is no pain involved in the therapy, but it maybe because I caught cold or more from psychological stress from being at hospital everyday that I have been feeling noxious all week.

Although I am scheduled to be at the hospital on the weekdays, I realized that I won't have any full consecutive 5 days that I have to go to the hospital. Next week there's a holiday for Emperor's birthday, then the week after is new year's break that the hospital is closed. I hope my nausea will disappear completely soon and no side effects appear at all, so that I can be in the festive mood soon!
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3 comments:

  1. Keibun Mori / 森　啓文December 16, 2011 at 8:03 PM

    You have to get ready before Jiro comes!

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  2. ChunCDecember 17, 2011 at 12:22 PM

    Prof Furness in the past invented and sold virtual reality glasses to the market where you can watch TV or play games. The product was a commercial failure, but he found out that dentist started buying these glasses like crazy. What dentist noticed is that kids stopped complaining about the pain.

    The same idea was applied to burn victims, where treating burn wounds is extremely painful due to exposed nerves endings. Professor Furness' HITLab created Sno World, where you wear a virtual reality helmet and you are completely immersed in a virtual world throwing snow balls at penguins. Burn victims felt a lot less pain due to the "distractions" caused by the virtual world.

    After reading your blogs, I am thinking this thing can be applied to chemo therapy. I should consider changing my research ;)

    If you want little more details, check out the links..

    http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/vrpain/

    http://www.oregonlive.com/health/index.ssf/2011/12/in_an_imaginary_world_oregon_b.html

    Chun

    ReplyDelete
  3. Angie (aka Eri)December 26, 2011 at 5:56 AM

    Thanks for the input, Chun! Your project is very interesting and I do think the product can be applied to chemotherapy patient as well, as long as it can sorely be used to lessen the painful experience, rather than turning the experience into a 'fun' one. I'll read more into your links.

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