Jen gets wired

Yesterday a representative from NovoTTF came to our house and trained us for about 2 hours on the operation of the equipment that Jen will be using.  Today we met with the representative again at UCLA in conjunction with our oncologist where the unit was actually applied to Jen and the doctor activated the device.  This is actually a complicated piece of machinery that Jen will be connected to indefinitely if we decide to continue using it.  We will have to see how this impacts Jen's quality of life going forward.  She will almost constantly have to be tethered to either an electrical outlet or a portable battery pack.  Switching power supplies involves several steps - turn off the TTF field, then power down the unit, then switch out a battery or change from electrical to battery, then power the unit back up, then reactivate the TTF field and hope no alarms sound.  You can imagine how annoying this will be if Jen wakes up in the middle of the night half asleep and needs to use the bathroom.  The pack weighs about 8 pounds and the batteries last about 2.5 hours.  They are big lithium ion batteries each about 9 inches square and 2 inches thick.  The portable unit and battery are housed in a backpack.  The Novo team seems to be very supportive as far as trying to accommodate any special needs we may have and they are available 24/7 for tech support if needed - which is a good thing because we are on our first day of use and the unit's alarms seem to be going off frequently.  So far we have been able to troubleshoot them all, but the unit does seem awfully testy.  The treatment does show some promise, but we will have to see how it goes in the next several weeks of using it.  And now for some pictures.

Prepping Jen's dome. 

Make it so.

As Jen's sister is fond of saying "It's a Look."

Welcome to Google Head-ware.