Remission phase I

Mt. Fuji...so beautiful!!

The good news is that there was no sign of malignant tumor regrowth (forgive me for the less use of proper vocabularies) after 2 months of radiotherapy treatment!! I was nervous to hear the result, and I'm glad it turned out to be a good news. My next check up is scheduled on June 1st, for a ultrasound test. Then another one in August 3rd.


PET scan
Last week I had PET scan at a prefecture-owned hospital that was about 40 minutes north of my home. This is because Tsukuba University Hospital doesn't own PET machine, which was surprising to me since Tsukuba University Hospital is the largest and the only university-owned hospital in my prefecture, Ibaraki. Anyhow, the PET scan went smoothly, and it wasn't very different from the experience at the UW, the only thing is that patients were to be rested in a public room with a divider rather than a private room.

I learned that my fear for injection still exists, when the nurse was injecting contrast medium to my body I had to close my eyes because it reminded me of chemotherapy. Then I felt noxious after the PET scan was done, although that could be a side effect from contrast medium rather than Pavlovian effect.

WBC count low
Yesterday when I had a blood test womehow my WBC# was only 2200, where on average human has 4000~6000 WBCs. Both my doctors from haematology and radiology were unsure of the cause, thus I will need to go back to the hospital next week to check up my blood again.

Interestingly enough, my haematology doctor guessed that the low WBC# may be caused by radiotherapy. He guessed that the radiation may have hit bone marrow that it led to less production of WBC#. On the other hand, my radiology doctor said that the effect from radiotherapy is unlikely and he thinks the WBC# was influenced by chemotherapy.

I don't think they are necessarily trying to blame on each other, but it showed the difficulties of determining causation for any symptoms. And when one is specialized in a field, perhaps one is likely to point a finger to other fields, which is understandable, but we need someone to put the pieces together to show the big picture. This applies in any field.

The hair story

Recently I saw a video clip on TV about a singer who went through a chemotherapy, where he took a picture of himself every single day to show the changes in his condition through appearance. It was cool to see how he lost his hair bit by bit, went to bald, then hair regrew bit by bit again. I didn't take as many pictures as he did, but I'm going to try something similar to it today.

September 2011

It looks like I still have a lot of hair here, but I remember starting to get annoyed by abnormally shedding. Hairs fell as I shake my head side to side. 

Radiotherapy took a lot of my hair away. It was interesting to see how it should look like when you compare my lower back head with that of my sister's.

1 week after radiotherapy started

My sister's head in comparison

December 2011, how I look normally at home

My hair looks like this now. It's just really thin. I thank my parents to have me born with thick and a lot of hair!

January 2012, how I look normally outside

Then wigging in...

I showed a picture of me in the 'newscaster style' wig to a couple of friends.It was interesting to hear people's opinion on this.

"You look like a Chinese actress!"
"The perfect hairstyle that cannot be achieved by natural hair."
"Looks like a spy, and it's fashionable."

I've never had a hairstyle like this, so it was kind of fun to play around with. But I made a very silly mistake by trying to straighten the artificial hair by hair iron, which burned a small part of the hair right before the wedding that I attended. Fortunately it wasn't very obvious!

And I have to say, that I don't enjoy wearing wig at all. I don't understand my aunt who loves it and wears it all the time. Wearing a wig always gave me headache because I don't like having anything tightening my head. However, miraculously, I did not have any trouble on my friend's wedding day...very strange. I had to wear the wig for 8 hours that day. My assumption is the constant consumption of alcohol that may have made my headache go away. So perhaps...alcohol should come with wig next time as well :P

February 2012, with a wig on