My thirty-seven radiotherapy sessions should have ended on Friday 20th October but the end date has just been put back to Monday 23rd October.

When I got to the hospital yesterday I was informed that due to problems with one of the linear accelerators, today’s session was going to have to be cancelled and another added to the end of my treatment cycle. Apparently, whilst it was undergoing regular maintenance and recalibration, one of the main components was broken … and the replacement had to be sourced from Belgium.

Hopefully, the broken linear accelerator will be fixed by Wednesday … but if it isn’t, I might end up having my other radiotherapy sessions rescheduled and my treatment cycle might stretch well into the last week of the month.

This situation is unfortunate but also unavoidable. The staff are doing their best to deal with the problem, and I understand that they may have to work longer shifts and/or give up one of the weekend days off. There are, however, limitations to the number of hours the working linear accelerator can operate for before it will need routine maintenance, so a delicate balance has to be maintained between the demand to deliver radiotherapy sessions and the need to keep the remaining machine within its operating parameters.