Radiation: Day 5 & the First Weekend Home

I am happy to report I love the apartment I moved into on Friday. I was up early to clean out the Airbnb and move the rest of my crap into the car. I discovered this new apartment building has carts, which meant only one big trip with all my stuff. The place is pretty big with floor to ceiling windows overlooking a river.

I had an appointment with my radiation oncologist in the evening that took all of 10 minutes. We’ll meet weekly and that’s when you go over all the side effects. Nothing yet to report.

I waited another hour or so for my scheduled treatment. It was late enough in the evening I knew I was going to head home on Saturday morning. Spent the night enjoying the views and catching up on Lizzo’s BIG GRRRLS.

I was up early Saturday morning and left before 7 a.m. The little turkeys were happy to see me. We spent the weekend drinking coffee, playing on different playgrounds, and running errands. Sunday came too fast. And poor Evelyn has some kind of infection, so we were at urgent care bright and early on Sunday.

I left in the afternoon to head down to Rochester. The highway is now down to a single lane starting this week…which really fucking sucks. Minnesotans like to line up about 2 miles early and then try to prevent you from using that other lane even though it’s open. Then I grabbed groceries, cleaned up the place, did laundry and prepped for the week.

Radiation wasn’t until 10:30 on Monday night. I was not looking forward to being up that late. I was pretty excited about having dinner tonight with someone I worked with at a previous job! Her family owns a winery down this way (the best in Minnesota!), and she invited me over for dinner with her family.

They have a beautiful place overlooking a ridge (I had no idea there were hills down here). It was fun to drive a little outside Rochester. Took some gravel roads and it reminded me of the back roads I took as a kid. They have three sweet boys – their youngest is Evelyn’s age – and a gigantic dog (a Pyrenes!). Dinner was delicious, and it was lovely to catch up with someone I haven’t seen in forever.

Mayo had left a voice message, turns out there’s a proton beam outage, whatever that means. I didn’t even know that could occur. I was pretty happy it happened on a night I was supposed to get treated at 10:30.

Only it happened again today (on Tuesday). Another day with no treatment. I assume this means I get two sessions tacked on at the end of treatment, not exactly a fun prospect. I hate that it means more time away from the kids.

So I’m here working by myself. It’s nice to have that distraction. Just hoping there aren’t any more outages.