The Continuing Adventures of Radioactive Man

If I was Radioactive Man a few weeks ago after the seed implants, today we would be seeing said superhero crawling along the ground as his life force got progressively lower and lower.  By my rough calculation, the Cesium-131 seeds are at about 5.5% of where their original strength.  And that's exactly where we should be about now.  So all is well, even if this means the death (or near death) of Radioactive Man. And I wanted to show the seeds here, and so I did some screen grabs of a video that one hospital site had about the brachytherapy (pronounced ... usually... like brake-e-therapy...).  So here they are, the first one on the left showing the seeds, the one on the right showing one of the needles used to put them in the prostate:

Of course, all this does is make way for a different version of the same story, only in this version the radiation will be coming from an external source, not one (or ones) I carry around inside me.  And getting prepared for that step was the reason for my latest visit to the radiation oncologist's office this week.
There was the usual preparatory sequence (aka enema) before a scan of the pelvic region.  It suddenly struck me as odd that the instructions (from the doctor's offices) have specifically stated that the enema should be done 2 hours before the appointment.  I have yet to find out *why* 2 hours (and not 3 or 1 ... or...)... All that meant that I had to get up at 5am to do the enema, because like a fool I had scheduled the appointment for 7am.  The big fun.  On all fronts.  Or backs.  Whatever.

I should stop and say something about where I am in the sequence of things.  I did the radioactive seed implants in December and they're winding down, so it'll be time to do the external beam therapy soon.  We're doing IMRT - intensity modulated radiation therapy - which is a form of external beam radiation.  The data from the scan today feeds directly into the planning stage.  Using the CT scan in concert with a computer program they build a map of where the beam should go and (equally important) what it should miss.  It's pretty cool, really... and after reading about it I'm pretty stoked about it.