Local treatment

Hospital food has a bad rep. But the Malay rice stall's offerings in the SGH canteen was quite palatable. The fish on the left was especially tasty. No, I don't know what kind of fish it was, but it had a gloriously fatty skin along the dorsal fin area that was delightful in assam gravy.

But the bigger question is, what am I doing in the hospital? To keep things simple, transport duty for a close but not blood relative to get his angiosarcoma seen to. That, btw, is a form of cancer that's rare but aggressive in nature.

The good news is that it's localized and treatment can be targeted specifically at the growth area with radiotherapy. A better option would be for complete surgical removal, but due to certain complications like ageing, among other things, the risk for anesthesia is too high to attempt.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been getting something of an education in the oncological process, at least from the patient's perspective. From the initial reluctance to accept the need for treatment to the eventual ok, let's get this over with. Today's hospital visit was for the radiologist to spell out the procedures for treatment, and the risks and possible side-effects therein. That being done, the patient signs the consent form and commits.

So, in the next two consecutive days we will be starting the process at the hospital. Calibration, not treatment yet. As the procedure is precise, measurements and calculations need to be done first. The urgency is there, but so is the care taken to minimize the risks involved.  We'll go slow and steady.