My experience with radiation oncology was not a happy one.
Its practitioners are devoted to it and can see no fault in it. When my throat was badly burnt by the radiation, they still wanted to carry on with the treatment and damage my throat even more. Their only solution to the continuing pain was to bomb me out with morphine, which is no solution at all. The damage is still there and has to be confronted eventually, generally through a couple of months of severe unremitting pain during healing. The damage to the throat is so severe that some people have to be fed via a naso-gastric tube while healing
As my pain was so great as to disturb my sleep that was crazy - a case of the solution being much worse than the disease. Getting a cancer ripped out surgically results in very little pain and only a few days in hospital. That calculus was very apparent to me so I abandoned the treatment. I will get 6 monthly PET scans to detect cancers anywhere in my body and get them removed surgically.
There were other side effects of the treatment too. You sleep a lot, lose your taste to some extent and develop scaly patches on your skin. No fun at all.
It took me all of 7 days to get my throat better so I am pleased to be able to eat with no pain now and into the future.
UPDATE of 25th
I look into the mirror only when I have to brush my hair. I try not to notice the raddled face staring back at me.
I did however notice that, in the last days of my radiotherapy treatment, my face on one side was swollen and rather red, a predictable effect of radiation.
I checked that in the mirror this morning and found that both sides of my face were the same colour and the same shape. I am now back to normal and no longer have a misshapen face. So the treatment did have a bad effect on my appearance but those effects have now healed. Lucky I'm a good healer. A woman would have been distraught by the effect on her appearance
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