There Is More Than One Way To Skin a Cat

One of my dad's valuable redneck sayings is "son, there is always more than one way to skin a cat". Well, apparently there is also more than one way to zap a cancer patient. I just saw a stanford-cancer-radiation-doctor for a second opinion and he had a few more ideas. I think his ideas were for the sole purpose of complicating matters as we go into the next phase of my treatment. He threw out a few more options, and that just means more decisions. Decisions are one of the worst parts about cancer because of the morbid way the risks are weighed against the costs: "Well, these guts are worth more than these guts, and if these guts go bad we can kind of fix them so we'd rather shoot them with radiation, but if these guts go bad then we will have to pull them out and feed them to pigeons". Here are more hard things about decisions:

1. I have cancer-brain.
2. I have a personal attachment to myself and most of my organs, creating a bias.
3. I don't have 8 years of medical school.
4. Everyone tells me something different.

The good thing about my situation is that I have doctors that I trust.

This guy was really good, and he brought up the possibility of shooting some beams in from angles behind me and then having them intersect at the point on my spine where my PET scan lit up. Apparently that way wouldn't hit my heart. Then he had the idea of using electrons on my sternum, which is some different kind of radiation. The best thing I heard him say is that the chances of getting cancer from the radiation is actually not 10% like the last guy said, but it is more like 1%.