Thanks, J, I didn't know where to send him.
Mine was throat cancer as is Clifto. My chemo was relatively gentle. Eight
weeks of carboplatin and Taxol. It was concurrent with the radiation which
tore my throat up and caused my weightloss from not eating. So I am not a
good model for comparison for yours. Sorry.

It's nothing like that, Chris. It has to do with my fear of the radiation
machine and my wife's hysteria over the anxiolytics I take to endure it.
Up until the other day this wasn't a problem. Then last week we had a
case where I had five minutes between taking the xanax and actually
going for RT. Fortunately, the nice people took someone else in my
place and gave me an extra thirty minutes to drink lots of water and
walk around a lot to help get whatever xanax I could into my system,
so this incident wasn't much worse than normal.

But the other day we had to rearrange our schedule to take chemo before
RT, and rather than actually doing chemo they just drew blood samples.
So we had two hours between the time we left the chemo place and the
time RT would start.

Now, if you check your PDR, you'll find that xanax reaches maximum
absorption into the body at around two hours, so this was perfect for
treatment. But Dr. Wife disagreed, threw an absolute sh.t fit, and
declared that I was taking the xanax to get high and not for any reason
having to do with treatment. Obviously, the other day I took it five
minutes before treatment and I was fine, so five minutes is enough. So
we wasted time while I anticipated the horror machine.

I went to treatment and told the people I was completely unmedicated,
and in extreme fear. They assured me about their intercom (through
which I've already seen they can't hear speech at normal volume) and
told me they'd keep a special watch on me. Then they strapped me down
and began twenty-four hours of absolute torture.

I have nearly no voice at this point, and at that point all I could
muster was a whisper. I must have scream-whispered "please stop!"
hundreds of times while the machine whirred away with my head jammed
in it. Had I been able to reason, I'd have stuck my hands in the path
of the beams to get them to stop the machine, or let my legs fall off
the sides of the table (a no-no per previous experience), Meantime all
I could think to do was to grab things tightly and pull with all my
might to help relieve the tension.

Once they unsnapped the eleventh snap (I count) I did my best to get
off that table and onto the nice, solid floor. Two or three of the
techs grabbed me and tried to keep me from going, fearing that I wasn't
aware I was over four feet off the floor. I laid there a while, and
everyone tried to figure out what was going on and felt guilty for a
while, and I was finally able to explain it to them. Somehow the subject
changed to how xanax works and I went through the litany; doctor's
comment was, "well, you've certainly studied your pharmacy." I told him
neither my regular MD, nor he, nor I was right, that Dr. Wife obviously
knew better than us all.

So yesterday, left with the choice of taking the xanax five minutes
before treatment (same effect as not taking it at all) or not taking
the RT, I cancelled the RT.

I cancelled for today, too, but I'm going to see the doctor. No one is
going to give me a fast-acting injectable anxiolytic for self-admin;
the cancer center doesn't do that themselves; even if I could hide the
drugs, I couldn't hide the purchases; and no one can say I didn't try
RT without the drugs.

It looks like my only alternative is to try to get placed in their
psychiatric ward so I can get to my RT premedicated, so that's what
I expect to try to do today. Failing that, I don't know any other
alternatives and will have to give up and drop to palliative care
and chemo. (IDEAS WELCOME but needed before 2 PM CDT.)

Incidentally, my body is fighting off the chemo as though it was water.
My last set of blood counts were normal for a normal average adult my
age. Yes, that's red cells, white cells, the whole shootin' match.
No nausea, only hair loss is that my beard growth stopped where the
radiation hits it. I had kind of expected the chemo to be what took
care of the lymph node involvement, but the nodes I know about are
still about the same size they were before I started chemo.

I've been promising myself to get to that. Short form: I'm back in RT now.
Long form: wife and I had a BIG argument during which it was decided that
*I*, not she, is the resident authority on drugs in our house (only by
dint of study, no education), and her only recourse to anything she thinks
I have wrong is to get the official word from a medical professional, of
which we have at least three readily available. Result: there will be no
more "xanax works in five minutes" arguments.