Lasers *pew pew pew!*

I was a little nervous this morning.  Excited nervous, but also, really, really hoping that there wouldn't be any issues with doing my first treatment of photodynamic therapy.  Livers respond very, very well to the treatment, but the approach an be tricky.  They're very bloody organs, though the concern for me was more about nerves rather than blood.  My doctor's confidence went a long way to soothing any worries--he's actually brought in specifically for liver treatments, as he's very good at the placement of the needles/fiber optic.  

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  First came my labs coming back and looking nearly perfect (yay!), IV support, then the systemic treatment through the catheter in my arm.  

The orange tube sheathes the fiber optic, which threads through the catheter into my vein.  The very bright red dot is the end of the fiber optic shining from inside my arm.  This part was easy peasy.

The treatment directly into the liver was a little trickier.  They prefer to only use a local anesthetic because patient feedback is very helpful.  Lidocaine isn't particularly fun--it burns somethin' fierce until it numbs, then all is well.  The mechanism is the same as the IV into my arm, except it's a longer needle and ultrasound guided either near to or into the tumor depending on the circumstances.  How long?  I didn't want to know.  The worst part of the whole thing was that I had to be on my side with my back to the doctors, so even with warning, my body was pretty tense with anticipation because I couldn't watch them.  As you can imagine, being very still is very important, but there wasn't really a way around having to be positioned as I was, so tension was it.

Meanwhile, hours later, I'm incredibly happy because my body is responding exactly like it should.  I have some pretty intense localized heat around my liver and my back.  The inflammatory response is positive one and welcomed. 

Short tangent: happiness took a hard detour when I started laughing at a ridiculous picture that my dad sent of my dog passed out asleep and I started laughing.  Much like the surgery in 2019, THERE WILL BE NO LAUGHING.  Same as then, my diaphragm took the opportunity to seize into a useless giant ball of pain and the downward cycle from there is really pretty crappy.  Exhaling is fine, but inhaling isn't--you can do the math from there.  I'll add the dog photo someday when I can laugh properly without fear of abdominal repercussions.  

More importantly than that, at the clinic, every IV bag has two things written on it.  Name and contents.  Usually scribbled, but legible enough.  During the time of laying very, very still, the nurse switched my IV from vitamins to a teeny tiny bag.  I asked Leannda what the new IV said on it.  She got close to read it and then said, "It looks like it says love?"  And that's everything we need to know about that.