The end of my Chernobyl Spa Days

Yesterday marked the end of my EBRT pilgrimage. Twenty-one precision-guided rituals at the Chernobyl Spa, where modernity’s most sophisticated death rays are deployed with bureaucratic cheer. One might expect balloons. A handshake. Perhaps a sticker. Instead, I was quietly deleted from the schedule. I ceased to exist at precisely 15:00.

This, of course, followed HDR Brachytherapy—an entirely separate saga in which a gnome-sized demon was inserted into my pelvis to wage microscopic war. But that’s a bedtime story for another PTSD support group.
There’s something about External Beam Radiation Therapy that really brings the term existential coordination to life. Each day, you show up. Not for lunch. Not for purpose. But to present yourself to the linear accelerator in a state of precise physiological readiness. The bladder must be full. The rectum must be void. The soul must be absent.

You clutch your water bottle like a sacred relic, not because you thirst, but because bladder volume has become a medical imperative. You are there to be targeted by millions of invisible particles designed to eradicate cells that have overstayed their welcome. The radiation is precise. Mathematical. Majestic in its cold indifference.

But before that ballet of beams begins, you must perform your own awkward dance: the meticulous coordination of bodily functions. This is not merely a preparatory step. It’s the gatekeeper. Arrive with the wrong contents in the wrong compartments, and you risk frying your rectum or missing your prostate entirely. The instruction manual reads: “Please try to urinate one hour before and drink 500ml of water.” Translation: Get it wrong, and you may cook the wrong organ. Radiation doesn’t do do-overs.

Your entire day begins to orbit this ritual. Meals are no longer timed by hunger, but by fiber intake. Laxatives become strategic allies. Your watch transforms into a cruel enforcer. And your brain becomes a battlefield of neurotic calculations: Did I drink enough? Too much? Is that a gas bubble or a biological betrayal in progress?
This negotiation with your own body is constant. Exhausting. Yet oddly intimate. In a world where you control nothing—not cell growth, not prognosis, not even the fate of your pelvic floor—this, at least, is something you can attempt to master.

And when the stars align—hydrated, deflated, and mentally broken—you lie down on the cold slab of mechanized mercy. What greets you is not recognition. Not thanks. Just the silent pivot of a robotic arm and the muted hum of indifference. The beam does not love you. It does not see you. It will not miss you when you're gone.
The technicians re-enter. “All done,” they say, as if you’ve just renewed your driver's license. You nod, grateful to leave. You shuffle out into the daylight, blinking against a world that does not know you just sacrificed your dignity for another millimeter of survival.

To the radiologist, you are not the climax of a delicate gastrointestinal symphony. You are “Patient #14, 14:45.” Your carefully measured bladder? A green checkmark. Your heroic bowel prep? A polite nod. Your existential angst? Muffled by lead walls and fluorescent lights.

It’s not their fault. They're overworked, understaffed, buried beneath tumors that are, statistically, not their own. Empathy is a luxury that fifteen-minute appointments do not permit. Were they to absorb the human drama of every patient, they'd implode before Tuesday.

Still, the contrast is jarring. For you, this is survival. Identity. Fiercely mundane heroism. For the system, it’s throughput. Efficiency. Patient flow.
And so you lie there, supine and vulnerable, gazing at two photographs of impossibly manicured gardens , as the dispassionate god that is the linear accelerator rotates around you, delivering photons to a target defined by millimeters and probability. It cares nothing for your dreams, your bladder, or your quietly clenched sphincter. And yet, this cold beam is the thing keeping you alive.
There is beauty in that contradiction. The most important war of your life is fought in silence, by strangers with charts and robots without bedside manner. You, meanwhile, are left with your plastic water bottle, your bathroom anxieties, and the quiet realization that coordination of bodily functions may be the most underrated survival skill of the modern age.

And tomorrow, you’ll do it again. And again. And again. Because cancer doesn’t care if you're tired. And neither, frankly, does the machine.

But your bladder? Now, that is a fussy little diva.
There has got to be a brochure for that.