I have heard variations on the admonition many times. The version that’s most meaningful to me is this:
“It’s not about the cards you’re dealt, but how you play the hand.”
If the game is one you’ve never played—and one you hoped you never would—you have to play it by ear. In other words, if the game involves juggling red-hot scalpels, you may have to invest in few pairs of leather welder’s gloves.
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My radiation treatments begin today with what the medical team calls a “simulation.” Here is how the Weill Cornell Medicine Radiation Oncology website describes the process:
During the simulation, the treatment setup will be simulated by positioning the patient on the flat couch immobilized by specially designed devices. The patient will then be aligned to the reference low-energy lasers in the room and be marked on the skin with tattoos. Finally, a CT scan will be performed to acquire the anatomy involved in the treatment. This important CT scan will be used to identify the lesion(s) and surrounding normal critical organs for developing a treatment plan that will guide the treatment machine to target the lesion(s) accurately and spare critical organs as much as possible. The simulated setup will be exactly reproduced before each treatment by matching the reference lasers in the treatment room to the tattoos and comparing the 2D/3D on-board images with the simulation CT scan.
The process of getting approvals, working out schedules, etc., etc. could take two weeks. Once the actual radiation treatments begin, I will have 27 treatment sessions (consecutively, on weekdays, as I understand it). The radiologist with whom I spoke yesterday told me he would use either 5 or 9 beams (depending on some complex analyses I do not fully understand) for the treatments. Aside from wanting the radiation to focus exclusively on the cancerous lymph nodes, his attention will be highly focused on avoiding damage to my duodenum and to the aorta where it crosses the duodenum. Or something like that. Scheduling chemotherapy, radiation therapy, physical therapy, and all the related/supporting medical procedures and tests is going to be quite the feat. I hope the members of the medical teams will coordinate between themselves—if I have to do the coordination, I will be concerned about the coordinator’s competency.
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Here I am, writing the same kind of stuff I always do, even though yesterday’s election signaled massive, ugly, unpredictable changes in this country. I act as if I can rely on the future as if the future will resemble the past. Ach! I just have to keep reminding myself, as do we all:
It’s not about the cards you’re dealt, but how you play the hand.
