Every so often along my cancer story I get a good kick in the nuts.  They tend to make things real and cut through to the core of my desire to believe that I have a normal life.

One happened a couple of Mondays ago.

I was at UPenn for a consultation with the radiation oncologist for proton radiation.  Before he came into the room, his resident came into the room to chat about radiation.  She told us about how it works and part of her job was to tell me about the side effects of radiation.  On her behalf, she hadn’t seen my MRI scans – shew as just giving me the entire picture.  Here are the side effects I could experience from radiation:

Fatigue, loss of hair, sunburn, short term memory loss, loss of sight in one eye, loss of hearing in one ear, secondary cancers, secondary cancers that may not show for a couple  of years (leukemia, melanoma).  I think that was it.

When the doctor came into the room, he confirmed most of those side effects, but he did it in the good cop sort of way.  He was confident there would be just a few side effects – maybe just the first three or four.

But holy crap – are you kidding me?  I feel like I live a somewhat normal life.  Loss of sight, loss of hearing, secondary cancers – real stuff that are reminding me that this a unique and difficult journey.