My cancer treatment regimen and its side effects: Radiation

So after the first treatment, because it was intense radiation and hit me in the midsection, that night I came home and sat in front of the toilet throwing up for probably 4 or 5 hours. And for the next probably 7, 8, 9 weeks I was just nauseous and tired. Radiation treatment was Monday-Friday. If you count to 120 radiation treatment didn’t last that long, but the effects were tremendous. I would come home after radiation treatment. The minute I’d get to my car, which was probably 5 minutes, 6 minutes after radiation was over, I could just start feeling my jaw muscles get real tired. What radiation does is it takes the white blood cells and the iron out of your body. So any energy you have is just basically going to be sucked out of you.

One thing that, luckily because I asked enough questions, red meat is the only way to really bring iron and the nutrients back to your body when you have such intense radiation. You can take iron supplements within vitamins, but red meat is the closest thing to a human body being coming from an animal and it gets absorbed a lot quicker. So I could eat the red meat right after radiation and feel the energy start coming back almost immediately.
Now that being said, I was still exhausted, still nauseous, still feeling like I should vomit, so it’s not a huge uplift. But it’s enough that I ate red meat twice a day, every day, during radiation, and shortly thereafter radiation was done just so I could start feeling some type of energy again. So I was eating red meat for lunch, and then dinner. So I highly recommend anybody’s who’s going through radiation treatment to make sure that they eat plenty of red meat and ask their doctor about that.

Because radiation makes you so tired and wipes you out, and your energy level is just zapped, I scheduled all my radiation treatments for the very last radiation treatment of the day at the hospital where I went. This way I can go to work, leave, go to radiation, and I would come home and I would immediately fall asleep for about two, two-and-a-half hours on the couch, before I would then wake up, eat some dinner, hang out with my wife for a little bit, before I collapsed for about 10 hours of sleep. Wake up and do the whole thing again.