Thursday, April 23, 2009

4.) What you don't want to find out about Radiation


After my second radiation treatment it hurt to pee and after the third treatment I started seeing blood in my urine. It's difficult to imagine finishing all 28 planned treatments with it going like this so quickly. That's not even the worst of it, I unfortunately came up with a new condition. Sexual anhedonia or 'ejaculatory anhedonia'. This means that one will ejaculate with NO accompanying sense of pleasure. This rare condition means one can suffer from lack of pleasure when the body goes through the orgasm process. Mine has been painful for several minuets like a bee sting and strong pressure like you have to pee but cant start at the same time, some fluid does come out but with no pleasurable feeling at all like an orgasm normally has.
Now after the eighth Radiation with Chemotherapy treatment I still have blood in my pee, a little more then yesterday and very red for the last few drops. So much for my worrying about erectile dysfunction. Getting and keeping erect is no problem, but my orgasm really sucked. When it happened I didn't feel any spasm at all. A fair amount came out but I would not have known if I didn't see it. Rather then the uncomfortable stinging painful feeling I've felt for the last week now I can't feel anything. No muscle spasm or hormone rush. No afterglow, happy sleepy feeling that I always felt before. A sad thought comes over me but this may be what many unsatisfied women feel. No wonder they want to talk during and after sex. I get it now. It Sucks. Now I wonder why I was so focused on possible erectile dysfunction. It never occurred to me there could be something worse. I never considered it might not feel good anymore. I need to put new thoughts into when hopeless is really hopeless and how it fits in my exit strategy, I may already be a lot closer then I thought. I had assumed my problems wouldn't really start to kick in until after the surgery. I don't know how many cancer patients plan an exit strategy for when things become unbearable, I have a definite plan but haven't talked to anyone about it, It should suffice to say that if things get unbearable by my definition of unbearable my hope is its mercifully brief.
Dr C. had no information on the orgasm change when I talked to him Tuesday. I wonder if anyone has studied this problem. The hospital took a urine sample to test for infection, when the resident called she said there was blood but no gross infection found. Heck, I drank so much water for the x-ray treatment before the sample was taken the pee was totally clear, it is a wonder it even tested as pee and not tap water. I'm impressed they even found blood.
Today's photo is the area of my pelvis getting radiation, it is the actual CT scan of me the hospital Physics department used to set up my position and radiation dose. I get 3 doses a day, one from each side and one from the back. they Davide it up to minimize the dose to neighboring organs. the dose to my hips is enough to give me a higher likelihood of having a broken hip in my lifetime. I get 1.8 Gray total per day (or 180 Rads absorbed dose. the new unit used is Gray) To put that in perspective The dose of radiation from a normal chest x-ray is 0.25 mRad. so everyday I get the equivalent of 720,000 full chest x-rays concentrated to my pelvis. A normal x-ray machine runs at about 70,000 volts, the particle accelerator they used to treat me runs at 5 million volts. Another interesting comparison is the radiation dose in Hiroshima at 1 m above the ground in open field at 1 km (.6 miles) from the hypocenter is estimated to be 4.5 Gy (less then 3 of my 28 treatments) At 2 km (1.2 miles) from the center it was only 0.08 Gy. I should note that the organ most sensitive to radiation, the small intestine is carefully minimized in my therapy. Somehow I find the comparisons interesting. Its amazing what our body's can tolerate.

1 Comments:

Blogger a Me said...

28 treatments?! Egads!

FWIW, talking after sex probably has more to do with increased the oxytocin we get when we orgasm and/or when semen hits the cervix. For me, anyway, increasing oxytocin makes me want *more* connection, and talking is one way I feel that. Plus, sex generally wakes me up and makes me feel more alert rather than less.

November 15, 2009 at 7:12 AM  

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