It was kind of fun being in Seattle for those six weeks. It would have been more fun if I had kept up my strength. I was afraid to walk four blocks to the Safeway by the third week. I just didn’t have the stamina or the muscles. I was very surprised at myself actually.
We stayed at The Collegiana, an old building reminding me of the 1940’s and without an elevator. I wanted to make sure I kept up what meager free exercise I could while I knew I’d be sicker as time went on. So I didn’t mind the stairs at all.
This is the Collegiana
We rode the Light Rail (1 Line) from the Collegiana to the hospital at the North end (not the end, but almost the end) of Seattle where the Proton Therapy building and the weekly chemo was. The sidewalk to the light rail was quite sloped up, and I hated looking ahead to see how long it still was ahead of me so I just read email on my phone as I walked and looked up when I thought we were almost there. There was a Starbucks ini the hospital and if we got there earlier enough, I could have a “Double Chocolaty Chip Creme Frappuccino” (no coffee) for a drink that lasted during the six once a week chemo treatments on Mondays.
Seattle Transit: The Light Rail
The Proton treatments were every week day, but the whole place basically shut down for the weekend, just like a school or college (oh…which it was/is). Most of my treatments were in the evenings which was great because the day wasn’t broken up by medical things. It was a full day of blah and knitting and other zoom call appointments (for them to make sure I was still alive I guess), and then the last thing to do was go get the proton. I don’t want to write about that because it was so bizarre. Mostly it was like being in a scary Frankenstein-ish movie where people and doctors did weird things to their patients in a strange room with strange machinery and zapping noises. There were sometimes four or five technicians and sometimes just one or two, but since I was snapped and trapped in by my head and neck, I couldn’t really look around to see what was happening. There was a total of 33 fractions of 6 beams each (that’s radiation talk…what I remember of it). When things didn’t go quite right or the machine was malfunctioning and took longer than expected, or when there was a new patient getting “broken in,” going home was kind of scary in the middle of the night when we had taken the bus and light rail to get there.