Bye-bye tattoo virgin

So I went to the cancer agency for my CT scan yesterday.

First of all they take you to a room and make you watch an in-house video that explains the whole CT scan procedure and the radiation treatments that I'll start in the near future. It was a cheesy but endearing home-video shot at the BC Cancer Agency, complete with wooden-top 'actors'. The woman who played the cancer patient in the video had a very familiar accent - not only english but a familiar Grimsby/Cleethorpes accent. I swear she could've lived down the road from me. I found it amusingly distracting.

There was a piece at the end of the video listing various cancer support services and a couple of the images were a bit wacky - someone laid in a hospital bed while a volunteer sat by the bedside singing songs to them and playing guitar. Another 'relaxation therapy' session showed people laid out on the room floor while a man stood amid them, tapping and shaking a tambourine. Call me cynical (I won't deny it) but it felt like a comedy skit.

At the end of the video I went back to the waiting room where the CT-Scan-ologist (that's their technical name, right?) came to fetch me and walked me to the room where she and another technician prepped me ready to be fed through the big, white CT-scanner doughnut. With some careful cross-referencing and drawing of dots across my chest, boob and into my armpit, they were ready to do the scan.

They both left the room while the mechanics inside the doughnut began to whirr and rotate, drawing up a 3D image that would be used to map out the exact route for the upcoming radiation treatments. Once again I had that detached sensation of role-playing, being physically in the room but struggling to accept that this is real and this is me, the accidental cancer patient, being zapped and scanned ready to set up a treatment plan I never expected.

After a little more checking, comparing and careful measuring, I was poked twice with a tattoo gun/syringe - one teeny tiny dot mid-chest and another near my armpit. That's it, my proud tattoo virginity out of the window - it bloody hurt though. I have no idea what kind of sado-masochist must enjoy the pain of a whole tattoo, especially those massive murals all over their body. (Or even the woman at my gym who has a 6" Christmas ribbon tattooed on the back of both her left and right thigh. Why oh why???)

So now I'm a marked woman, haha. Radiation in....radiation out. I went for the 'freckle' look - although the tattoo mid-chest (where my cleavage should be, if I had a cleavage) is actually darker and more obvious than the discreet dot just below my armpit. Hopefully make-up will cover it.

Apparently they need a couple of weeks to go through all my scans etc. to map out the radiation sessions so I'll probably get started on the actual treatments early October for 22 treatments, which means it'll be more like early to mid-November before I could start work. Of course there's that minor detail of actually getting a job to go to! I'm still applying for jobs in the meantime anyway but I'm not putting too much pressure on myself at this point.

So me and my two new 'tats' are just waiting to get started on the next phase of all this stuff.