My secret tattoos
26 January 2010
I was listening to Vicki Archer on the Sunday Best show on Radio Shropshire one morning and she was teasing the newsreader about whether he had any tattoos. No he didn’t, (the whole banter bit was a link to a mention of a Tattoo convention being held in Telford), but, said Vicki, he could have a “Tweetie Pie” tattooed on his leg that would be hidden and only he would know the secret while he was reading the news! No! He really did not see the point of having a hidden tattoo!
I have a hidden tattoo, or tattoos!
Just three tiny dots on my belly. You could mistake them for moles if it wasn’t for the fact that they were blue not brown. In fact, what they most look like is dots made by a Biro!
They are not beautiful tattoos, they are hardly visible, though I am very aware of them.
They are the guidance tattoos for my radiation treatment.
Radiation treatment aims to damage the cancer cells enough to destroy them. Healthy cells have better recovery mechanisms than cancer cells, but all the same you want as few healthy cells to be damaged as possible. So they don’t just shove me under a radiation blaster and hope for the best.
I had some CT scans, (that’s the one where you go through the big hoop), and they plotted very carefully where my tumour was and exactly where they wanted to aim the treatment. I had to lie very still while they scanned me and then not move until they had drawn all over my belly in felt marker, and then again different colour felt marker for corrections until they were very, very sure where they wanted to tattoo me. At one point I had to get off the bench and lie the other way up, because I am quite tall and the hoop wouldn’t slide along far enough to reach everywhere they wanted to scan in one go.
One advantage of the tattoos being so small is that they didn’t hurt, no more than being prodded by the Biro whose marks they resemble!
It was very cold in there, and I had to lie around a fair while in not very much, so feeling chilly was much more uncomfortable than the tattoo, luckily I wasn’t wearing an underwired bra, as you have to take off anything with metal in.
I was very glad to get back into my clothes and immediately resolved to buy a big fluffy dressing gown, a silky one is just not up to it.
So once I had my dots tattooed on, I could start going for radiation treatment.
The radiation treatment itself was a doddle, I just lay on a bench, let them line up on my dots and then a big metal box hummed at me a few times. One hum from my right hand, one hum from overhead, one hum from my left as it chugged over me in an arc, and back again. The worst part about having radiation treatment was travelling in every day, and waiting in the waiting rooms. I did feel more sleepy than usual. It swallowed up the days like a full time job. I would be ready and waiting for transport from 8am onwards and was rarely home by lunchtime, by the time I had a nap because I felt sleepy, three months of my life disappeared!
I did get some quite painful radiation burns, but that is an after effect like sunburn. I didn’t feel anything while I was actually under the machine, and I didn’t start burning until I was four or five weeks into my radiation treatment. A lot of people have shorter courses of radiation than that, and as the cancer had grown right down the side of my vagina the areas I was having radiation treatment on were more sensitive than most people would have to deal with. They did give us all a bit pot of soothing aqueous cream to slather our skin with.
Once the radiation treatment was over, the burns started to heal.
And I have three blue dots still tattooed on my belly to remember it by.
Read other posts in Val’s diary here:
2 June 2010 – Hooray for corsets
3 March 2010 – It’s your funeral
24 February 2010 – So what is a stent?
10 February 2010 – A nice cup of tea
3 February 2010 The joys of negative thinking
20 January 2010 – Plumbing problems (part II)
20 January 2010 – Plumbing problems (part I)
6 January 2010 – Of vampires and vaccinations
29 December 2009 – Beauty and fashion
17 December 2009 – How the Doctor kept me going!
11 December 2009 – Why am I not depressed?
4 December 2009 – Why I didn’t want to attend Severn Hospice
