Rosie's private squished world

The puppies are growing and giving lots of pleasure. During the week they had their last vaccination for a while and were booked in at the vet for the big chop two days before Rosie has her radio surgery. Rosie is back to finishing her scarf.

The girls and Wilma enjoyed meeting Barb and Dick's (Barb is Operations Director for the MSO and Dick Panting is a Kiwi violin maker who used to be in the NZSO many years ago) two newish kittens last weekend. Rosie is constantly hankering after more kittens so opportunities to play with someone else's have to be nabbed when they present themselves.

This morning Rosie, Wilma and Peter went to Peter Mac for Rosie's "fitting". The pictures show pretty clearly what took place.

The frame for Rosie's head is attached to the bed and she lies with her head resting on a small cradle at the back. They then move her into exactly the right position and fine tune the frame adjustments so that two grey earpieces fit into each of her ears. This will be part of the mechanism which will prevent any movement of her head. Then somebody has a play with dentists' putty and makes a small pizza base which will fit over the top part of Rosie's face. This enables them to put the other half of the frame on her head and screw it down to the bottom half without hurting her (much). The putty hardens quite quickly (but is still soft on her skin) and becomes a detailed mask of her eyebrows and nose area. This will be used on treatment day to help exactly relocate and hold the frame on her head. So the four points of pressure which will keep her head still are the two probes in her ears, the central top part of the frame which exerts pressure on the middle of her forehead just above her eyebrows and the cradle at the bottom of the frame which exerts counterpressure right at the top of her neck or base of her head.

They kindly put some gladwrap over her eyes and eyebrows before the pizza base went on so she wouldn't have an unwanted eyebrow wax when the mask came off. Then the seethrough space helmet went on over the whole lot. It has lots of holes all over it throught which a measuring rod can be inserted so they can record measurements all over her head and check them when necessary to make sure the frame is in exactly the same place. They work to getting treatment targeted to within a 2mm margin of error.

When Rosie was all tight and secure in her private squished world everybody left the room and she had about 3 or 4 minutes of CT pictures taken.

The team were thoroughly impressed with how well she handled the morning, not moving for something like an hour altogether and from their point of view are happy for her to have the treatment awake but will leave that decision to us. The fact that she fitted (just) into the pediatric frame was a big relief because it means she doesn't have to have the adult version which seems to require being screwed into the skull with four screws and therefore would for a child have necessitated a general anesthetic.

Judging by how Rosie went this morning, it seems she can probably handle the treatment awake. She would be locked into the frame for about the same amount of time she endured today but instead of the 3 or 4 minutes when we left the room for the CT, she would have the radiation treatment itself for about 15 minutes. We'll talk about it over the next few days and see how she feels. There is no doubt it's uncomfortable (she had a pressure mark on her forehead but it was gone by the time she was back at school half an hour later) and not the least bit fun but if anybody could put up with it our Rosie could.

She will be getting a teddy to be friends with her other teddies and a kitkat for enduring this morning and another one after the treatment. Her initial request was for $300 and 50 kitkats, then, when that was turned down, for another puppy, then for a kitten so Wilma figures a teddy and a kitkat is getting off pretty lightly. After a few minutes of looking a bit traumatised by the whole thing immediately after she was released from the head vice, she recovered pretty quickly and was bouncing off with her friends when Wilma dropped her off back at school for the rest of the day.