This is much of what I wrote to my family, etc.:

This morning was my first radiation treatment. If this was what it would be like, how I would feel afterwards, from now ’til the end, I’d be great. It’s not, but I won’t worry about that for now. In fact, for now, it was what it was.

My wife and I arrived at the Cancer Center at about 8:15a. I’ve heard that it is difficult to find a parking space there later in the day, but there were plenty there at the early hour.

Inside the waiting room, Diane – to whom it had been demonstrated – flicked my card with a bar code past the standup reader, and they knew that I was there. Sort of. You see, in a few minutes, the tech came out and called for, “Mr. Gilmore.” I thought first of Gary Gilmore, but he’s long dead and the idea of my being there was that I am alive and will stay that way.

I left Diane in the waiting room and ventured through a few halls into the treatment room. (It was not the same as the other one; in fact, this one was more spacious. More comfortable, I thought.

I looked up on the wall, and there was a photo they had just snapped of me – a pretty good one – and some information. It was on a medium-sized internal projection screen, it looked like. I put my glasses, hearing aid, little silver Cross, and t-shirt on the counter below.

On Monday, they had made a mask for me, and a breathing thingee. (”Thingee” is here a better word than “tube,” as “tube” connotes something long and thing. This is really a mouthpiece, and I suppose I could have called it that. I laid back on the bench/gurney thing of the machine, my head in its special spot, oval and raised on the edges. They put in the mouthpiece then shoved the mask onto me.

Their voices, as I then heard them, were muffled by the sides of the mask. But they drew on the mask and the, unbeknownst to me, gave me my treatment. I think it was when twice, the room went dark briefly and I heard a whirring sound.

But I was done. Diane tells me that it was only 20 minutes, and the girls told me that it would take less time from now on.

I’ve no pain, no discomfort; I’ve the knowledge that it is being treated. I’ve warnings of what’s to come, but I’ll worry about that when it happens.

Wake up, go to the cancer center and flick my card, get called back, get my treatment, and leave. It will feel like an endless march with no recourse. I’ll be a machine which performs its daily function then departs. But I’d spent a long time waiting for the doctors to test and to diagnose. It was unnerving, but the treatment is, a long last, underway.

I’ve radiation tomorrow, and my first chemo goes on Friday.