Day -3

Woke up at 6:45 to go down to the radiation therapy room. They brought in a wheelchair that was draped in a white sheet, fixed a white sheet around her IV stand, and put a white sheet over her on my lap while they wheeled us down. She woke up as we were entering the room, pointed to the big particle accelerator and said "Dadda, whoa!" Then they gave her the anasthesia and she went under.

For the therapy, they laid her on a styrofoam pad on the floor, directly underneath a wand that protrudes outward from the accelerator. The radiation comes down in a cone shape from the wand. They positioned her on her back with her knees up and her head to one side, and placed little round shields over part of her lungs. In the afternoon, they put her on her stomach. They'll alternate like that tomorrow and Wednesday as well. When they got her positioned, they took a picture with the accelerator to make sure the radiation was going to cover her entire body. Just the picture gave her something like 5 cGy of radiation, which they had to back out of her dose of 200 cGy.

She seemed fine when she woke up. The biggest problem was that she didn't want to be back in the room. She had a low-grade fit for about 20 minutes, pointing to the door and saying "Go!". We couldn't really blame her. She slept for a couple of hours in the late morning, then had to go back down at 3:00. When the second course was finished, she was finally allowed to eat something, and she surprisingly was interested. But she spent most of the evening just laying on top of either Keri or me. She did spike another fever tonight around 11:00, but didn't throw up so hopefully that's progress.