I started my radiotherapy journey in June 2025.
After plenty of much-needed family time in the last blog, it was time to crack on with it.

In the meantime, the doctors had drawn up my radiotherapy plan and decided exactly where to target on the tumour area for maximum effect.

The process begins with a mask fitting. These masks hold your head perfectly still during treatment because even the slightest movement can change where the radiation hits, so precision is everything.

The fitting involved stretching a warm thermoplastic material over my face. It moulded itself perfectly as it cooled and hardened. You could still breathe, but it did feel a bit claustrophobic. As it cooled and shrank slightly, the pressure increased. Not painful, just uncomfortable and oddly intense. Every time I would wear it, it produced a weird dimpled-looking appearance seen in the photo, which I would refer to as my Lizard skin!

Radiotherapy meant being at the hospital five days a week for 30 sessions, which was quite demanding. I was based at BHOC, the Bristol Haematology and Oncology Centre. The waiting room itself was pretty nondescript, usually with Antiques Roadshow or BBC News playing on the TV during my appointment times (Antiques Roadshow was my favourite.)

Each day, while checking in, the receptionists would remind you which machine you were scheduled for. You would glance at the whiteboard behind the desk, where the different machines labelled A through E displayed their delays: ten minutes, twenty minutes, forty-five minutes. It became a bit of a ritual. I usually came straight from the Harbourside gym, which isn’t far, but I often thought about how tough it must have been for those travelling much farther and relying on hospital transport. For them, it was a full-day commitment, whereas my days were neatly divided into thirds: Morning Routine —- Radio Treatment —Evening Routine.

Most days, they ran about 10 to 20 minutes behind. I didn’t mind. I had nowhere else to be and always brought a book or got some ‘work’ done. I looked at my appointments as “be there from this time, and they’ll get to you as soon as they can.” The waiting area sat at the centre of all the radiotherapy rooms, like the hub of a wheel with each treatment suite branching off it.

Over the weeks, I met so many different radiographers, each with their own personality. I tried my best to remember all their names. Each one would call you by name, introduce themselves, and make you feel seen. There was Elle, the Australian girl who was always full of life, almost like she was likely to burst into song at any moment. Rob, built like a Welsh hooker (the rugby kind), bearded, bald, and tank-like, yet clearly a gentle soul. He mentioned he was training for a bodybuilding competition, and we bonded over how evil leg day is. There also was James was a biomedical graduate who had switched into radiography, and Holly was the first radiographer I met, the one who had done my mask fitting. There were many many more, but suffice it to say, I was put at ease by their care and attention to detail. 

The tricky thing about radiotherapy is that each appointment actually only lasts about ten minutes, so conversations often get cut short, only to be continued the next day. Despite that, they all made the experience personal, warm, and often surprisingly funny. If I was lucky, they’d even let me choose a song to play during my session. There was one time when Rob subjected me to the torture of late 90’s pop, but much to my shame, I found myself actually taping my foot to it! 

Two or three radiographers would work together to make sure I was positioned correctly on the table. They’d clip on my mask, line everything up, check I was comfortable, and then head off to their radiation-protected room to begin the scan. As you can see it’s fairly open and not like sliding into any MRI machines. Extra points if you guess correctly the song that that playing in the video.

My daily routine became quite structured. I’d wake up around 7:00 or 7:30, take a cold/ice bath to wake up (yep, still doing that, horrible, but necessary if you’re me), have breakfast, hit the gym around 11, then head to my appointment around noon or early afternoon. After that, Jessie and I would either head home or find a coffee shop to get some work done. I sometimes needed naps, so I left room for one if fatigue hit. I had the odd seizure during my treatment period, though no more than before, maybe even fewer. The pattern stayed much the same.

Throughout treatment, there was one familiar face, Hazel, the specialist oncology nurse. She met with me every week to check in about side effects. I’d known Hazel for years, as she had been a loyal patient at my practice since 2014, and it was strange yet comforting to find myself on the other side of the consulting room. Her warmth, professionalism, and knowledge were exactly what you’d want in a clinician.

My hair started to fall out exactly when Hazel said it would, almost suddenly at the start of week three. I found it both funny and disturbing. Huge clumps of hair were coming out, almost like I was having radiation poisoning (which, in a sense, I was) or as if a tactical nuke had gone off over the Bristol Channel. (My action-movie brain was working overtime.)

I didn’t expect it to bother me as much as it did, but it hit deeper than I thought it would. Still, I got off lightly overall, with fatigue and hair loss being my main side effects. I decided to take pre-emptive action by shaving my head early, first down to a number one, and then all the way to the skin by week three.

If you’re unlucky enough to every need radiotherapy I hope it goes as smoothly as mine, I think a lot of it is how your body responds to the radiation, and that is really unpredictable.  For what it’s worth, I kept moving as much as possible, stuck to my sleep discipline of at least 8 hours per night and tried to treat each day as normally as I could while listening to my body.

It was with huge relief and a fair bit of emotion that I finally got to ring the bell. Jessie, as always, deserves a special mention here because I couldn’t have done it without her. Her unwavering support is a blessing. 

Radiotherapy marked the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. By mid-August, I had started chemotherapy, which brought its own set of challenges, routines, and lessons. That will be the focus of the next blog, where I’ll talk about how that transition went and what life looked like during the next phase of treatment.