Zap - the real thing

First Radiotherapy treatment today.
My Mother-in-law came with me to the hospital - we didn't know what effect it was all going to have, would I be tired or whatever? DH has been at work all day and it seemed silly for him to take a day out just to accompany me when MiL lives about ten minutes drive from the clinic and I have to go almost past her house to get there... So I picked her up on the way past, on the basis that if I did feel rubbish she could drive me home. Seeing as how I paid the extortionate £1 premium to add her to my new insurance policy she might as well drive the car occasionally!

It was all a bit of an anticlimax, really. They gave me a gown, which I was told was mine for the duration of the treatment. A real fashion accessory - so big that I could have got me and the radiographer into it, with a zip up the front. As an interesting twist there were no seams at all - where you'd expect seams at the shoulder and down the side, there was velcro...

I clambered onto the couch - and then I found out what the velcro is for. They basically removed the front of the gown so that they could get at my boob - and the teeny tiny tattoos. Arms went up into the rests above my head, green laser lights shone and the couch moved up, left, right, backwards, forwards - it was a bit like being on the "Golden Shot" - I quite expected someone to say "Bernie, the bolt"...
The machine has a number of parts which rotate around the couch - one is the thing that does the zapping, with a glass front and a shutter behind which opens when it's zapping like a sort of malevolent eye... there are also a number of flat grey plates, which are the image receptors - the beast also acts as a scanner to take images of the tissue that's being treated so that they can check that nothing is moving - I guess that if the tissue swells up because it's sunburnt then the alignment will be wrong...
So eventually the radiographers ran away and I was left on the couch, suspended about five feet above the ground, with the zapping machine rotating around me. It moved, then stopped and waited - this was when the images were taken, although nothing appeared to be going on. Then the glass bit swung around so that it was pointing obliquely at my boob - at an angle that would mean that the beam was going across my ribcage, so only my boob got zapped and not the rest of my chest. It buzzed for roughly 11 seconds, stopped, then buzzed for another second. (When you're lying there like a sacrificial lamb counting slowly is as good a distraction as any!) The whole thing then rotated so that the thing was pointing across the boob from the other side and the thing sapped me for a further 11 seconds and then another.
Then the ladies bounded back into the room, swung the couch back down towards the floor and patted the gown back into its velcro'd wholeness once more.

And that was it. The whole thing took about twenty minutes including getting changed, and I was out with no ill-effects to see. I dropped MiL back at her place and headed home, wondering what the fuss was about!