Zimmer Cancer Center

Today was my third day at Zimmer, the outpatient cancer clinic at the hospital. They do both radiation therapy and chemo here. The radiation therapy machine is insane. But for $6 million, I guess that's what I should expect. I met with the dosimetrist today (the guy who figures out how they're going to dose the radiation patients) and was just blown away. The amount of math, art, and technology involved is amazing--it can take a whole week just to work up the radiation schedule for one patient.

I've learned a ton about different symptoms caused by chemo and radiation treatments. We give the Eating Hints booklet from NCI to our patients as a resource on how to manage symptoms. Patients here are a lot more appreciative of your input and more willing to do what you suggest than they are in the main hospital, I feel, which is nice. There's also a lot of social work involved in the work of an outpatient RD--like helping direct patients to free or cheap sources of supplements or directing them to food pantries. Of course, there's still only so much advice you can offer them sometimes. There's nothing you can really do for the poor man with esophageal cancer and severe mucositis except tell him to try to drink as much as he can and to wait it out. Seriously, I had no idea humans could hack up that much phlegm. It not nearly as gross as a pressure ulcer that has destroyed an entire ass, but unpleasant nonetheless.

The moral of the week also seems to be: don't drink, smoke, or have sex-- they all lead to cancer. Also, don't wait 10 months to get a lump in your leg checked because it will turn out that you have metastatic melanoma, with mets to pretty much everything, and there will be nothing they can really offer you except palliative treatment. At age 33.