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shalannaAfter watching with cynical glee the James Frey controversy, I thought I'd post this crappy memoir thing written by some weirdo. I'm sure it's completely made up. We need to go after this person. If this person could get published, I could get published!!
THE ZAP PALACE
They say this is a safe and healing place, just like home. If you live at 13 Chernobyl Place.
Radiation Therapy 3 is where they do all the "head cases." It is to be "my" machine.
When they lay me on that table, they're constantly telling me "just hold still." But then, they're walking OUTSIDE the several feet of concrete and that lead door that goes "boom" when it closes, and I'm in here alone.
With my head in the mouth of the dragon.
Did you know that those _CAUTION RADIATION AREA_ signs on the doors that lead back here are required by law? They must be on any doors opening to areas exposing personnel to >= 5 millirads per hour. I worry about my nurses, techs, and doctors in 20 years.
Steroids make my face puff out. I look like Miss Piggy, only not nearly as pretty.
The skin on my forehead feels mushy-crunchy to the touch, like a Styrofoam packing peanut. I tell my nurse when she asks that yes, my scalp and head feel funny. Sometimes I get weird pains, but mostly it's a surface thing--okay, frankly, it itches like lice crawling around. I know this is an accurate simile because in college, several of us in my church group came back from a mission trip with passengers . . . head lice. We all used that lice shampoo with Lindane, leaving it on our heads for several minutes. I can't help wondering whether this caused my current problem, or at least aggravated it. Or, I theorize it could be from the hexachlorophene in the pHisohex I used to bathe in as a child to treat bladder infections. What does it matter? All that matters now is to get rid of it.
I go in for radiation at 10 every morning for the next five weeks, weekends off. There are to be 25 treatments of around 180 rads, which is the safe level according to whatever it's according to, but which kills the weak "bad" cells that would be at risk for starting up this problem again. Strange that, though it's benign, this is a case of a part of your own body programmed to rise up and take over like a megalomaniac; it does not understand that if it gets greedy and kills you, the host, it kills itself! Duh!
Last week, I helped with an art project: they made my mask. It's a sort of grid-screen thing that they shape to your face, hard plastic stuff. The first few times they strapped on the mask and bolted it to the table, with my nose firmly squashed where the plastic grid had been molded around it, I had a huge asthma attack. "Hold still! You have to keep still," urged the well-meaning technician. I was trying not to freak out, knowing I had to be brave.
They did simulation the first week, which means they just took CT film, an x-ray, but they turned on the positioning laser. It's just the weirdest thing you can imagine. Until you actually have the first treatment with that huge friendly dragon.
All you can do is lie there and pray.
# # #
I can't see to drive, and besides I'm in no mental shape to navigate the expressways of Dallas. My elderly mother is driving me to and from the radiation that just started Monday. They changed my "treatment plan" several times at the radiation therapy place, trying to figure out just how to get the best shot at the sneaky underside of the gland, where the recurrence came from. The usual "ports" at temples and in front of ears reach the top and middle of the gland's lobes, but don't really concentrate on the anterior lobe. They're now doing a "flying wedge," where they DO shoot the beam through "thinking parts," but they reassured me it was best because it used a small dose in each of the locations through which it rotated.
The first day of treatments, I balked. The headrest that my first treatment tech assured me was "mine" was missing. They decided to use a shorter one but I refused. In simulation, they directed the beam to an area smaller than an English pea and we couldn’t have the beam be off or too close to my optic nerve! I pulled open the drawer where the other tech stashed "my" headrest. It was empty. The nurse told me it was okay and just to get on the table. Prayer must bend the beam, I told the Lord.
The next day they put the same headrest on there and I realized that the day before this thing had been UPSIDE DOWN. That was why it was so apparent that it was inches lower and so forth.
The lasting effect is that I developed a variable blind spot in the lower left quadrant of my eye. Bastards. I told them that headrest was wrong. Should have walked out, but they insisted I was just hysterical. One day would not have mattered. (The blind spot is there when I'm tired and when I first wake up. It sometimes is "branches" of a white light or little Morse-code type flashes, over some visual area but it's not normal, ever. Did I mention this is MY body, not their Hurry-Up People Are Waiting thing? Sigh.)
The asthma attacks I had the first three times inside the "vault" have gotten milder, and maybe I won't feel freaked out at all by next week, when the hair loss and fatigue set in. The doctor and two of the technicians are balding, and they just laugh when I express concern about having a bald "headband," a sideways Mohawk. It's pride, foolish pride. What's important is that my head doesn't fall off.
One morning as I paced, dizzy, in the staging area where patients wait for the machine, the woman just treated in "my" machine walked out, tottered over to the trash can next to the water cooler, and started vomiting. Everyone from patients to medical staff acted as though this were perfectly normal.
There's a little boy here who can't be more than five years old, here with his grandmother. I pray that they're here with someone else, but then I see the purple X inked on his Adam's apple. I can't stop crying as I bash through the double doors with the CAUTION RADIATION AREA on them. I don't want to find out what's wrong with him.
Later on my mother and his grandmother talk in the waiting room. He has a twin sister at home and five other sisters and brothers, all under twelve. His mother couldn't bring him because she's taking care of them all on welfare. No word on the daddy. He says the worst part for him is that he's so lonesome. He misses his twin. But he's enjoying the Ronald McDonald house. He's never been in such a big city.
This gorgeous little blonde child. I never could have any children.
He's so brave. I, on the other hand, am a chickenshit coward.
I'm a terrible patient.
# # #
Did you know I have a physicist? The coefficients that are typed into the machine are different for each patient. The dose is figured by your very own physicist. Hell, maybe I should've majored in physics, and then I might've been the one figuring the unlucky people's doses instead of getting one.
These big orange radiation signs scare everybody who walks into the Cancer Center building, especially the patients. Even those of us, like me, who don't have cancer, but have one of the benign conditions that can be best treated with radiation. This is all explained in the booklets they give you at the Radiation Therapy center.
Of course I don't call it that. I call it the Zap Palace.
# # #
I have radiation sickness.
(Urp.)
Not like the Japanese at ground-zero-plus-some, of course. Just a little nausea before and after I eat (something nice and bland like saltine crackers or Nabs Peanut Butter Orange Crackers That Look Artificial But Have Protein And Don't Make Me Hurl . . . and between times a glass of 7-UP or a Slurpee or some frozen yogurt or ice cream). It's not like they're going to run the Geiger counter over me like in "Project X From Outer Space," and say, "She's full of crickets," or anything. But it's kind of icky.
Don't let anyone tell you're not going to be nauseated when you have radiation therapy. Oh, I know why they tell you "it depends": they're hoping that if they don't suggest it, you will escape it. But I didn't escape it, even though my particle beam didn't go anywhere near my innards; it went to the center of my head.
But I'm still nauseated, whether I eat or not.
That's just a function of being seven treatments away from the last one, yay!, with the "full safe dose." Hmm. And just what IS the safety of this dose, Doctor? Care to join me in the lead-lined room with 6-ft walls of concrete at the end of the tunnel with the solid lead doors? No, thanks. We'll just watch from our monitors out here down the hall. . . . (and that's only the technicians. The docs just read the film from further downhall. Hee!)
No, I'm not starting to doubt it all. Tell you what, when you're on the table and it's in position and your head is strapped in position ("keep your chin up in that mask, now...don't move. . . here we go!) and they leave, and then you hear the lead door bonk shut, you and God are in there alone.
So you just lie there and whisper prayers, telling the Lord how thankful you are that He's in control, and that you trust Him to guide that beam where He wants it to go, only to any "bad" places and cells, and protecting your optic nerve(s) and brain parts; you keep calm and don't fall off the table and feel like it went to the proper place.
Then the ambient light comes back on, and the table whirrs and hums and ratchets down and forward a few feet, and the door unlocks and opens, and one of your two techs comes into the room and takes the "helmet" mask thing off your head. "That's all for today." You sit up like it was just some normal thing, feel your head about to fall off but then it gets OK, just a little light-headed and tender, but you can walk down the hall and keep your head on the leash. . . .your head, the balloon you pull along, bouncing against the ceiling.
I try to tell them I'm not having those leg jerks and attacks of "the shakes" all over my body on purpose. My brain doesn't want to be zapped. It’s all you can do to lie there. After all, this is the brain . . . where I live.
If only it were your foot or your butt or anything but your brain getting the dose, it wouldn't be so bad. You only have the one brain. And when you live the life of the mind and aren't athletic and can't sew or do crafts and can't have children, you sort of hate to think that your brain might get fried. It makes it difficult not to have rigors, but I manage to hold still.
It's weird, but when they don't come in to get me right away after the final beam darkens, I can get panicky. What if they've forgotten me? They'll just leave me in here, strapped down, until they remember.
I know, intellectually, that they have more patients lined up to come in, and so there wouldn't be much of a delay. But by then I'd have died of this panic, rapid heartbeat, freakout. Sometimes I shout, and they come bursting in as quickly as the lead door will open. "We're only waiting for the film. You're all right."
I never can get across to them that if they'd just touch me with one hand or something, I could calm down and wait a few more minutes. I hate to think how that would mess up their training, the distance they have to keep. I don't know how they can do this every day. You have to admire them. Why do we have parades for sports "heroes"? These are the heroes and heroines.
# # #
As I make my way down the inner hall, a clump of chestnut hair floats off the woman in front of me onto the floor. Everybody else accepts this as normal. I step around it.
The patient before me, a woman I have greeted daily as she walked out of the treatment area as I went in, didn't show today. I do not know whether she quit or got sick. Later someone mentions that some people die from the radiation before they can complete their treatments. This makes me feel so much better. . . .
# # #
Visualization.
Several people who've come through a serious illness have told me that attitude and visualization are the most powerful tools we have. Wherever I am, I just close my eyes and begin.
I am visualizing the rubbery green men of the clean-up crew in my body. They look kind of like a lighter-skinned Gumby. They spend their time stomping around in the port-selected areas of my braincase and body. They scrape up any cells that look abnormal, and, with their silver ice-cream-scoops, they pack them into steel buckets. When the buckets get full, they seal the tops and jump into the bloodstream, which floats them down to eliminate the buckets. Then they come back up where the white cells scavenge the healthy tissue left for any specks. Meanwhile, the rubbery Gumbys are stretching themselves around anyplace where cells should be and aren't, or are dying or missing, and they replace the tissue while it heals around them. They replace the function and make the healing complete. _Let this be a metaphor for the healing my body is receiving._
# # #
Mama says she thinks something in our house caused this. Environmental factors. She says, without thinking, "If this comes back on you in six months, then I'll know I'm right, and I'll have the last word with your husband." Well, that reminds me of the one-dollar bet in the film _Trading Places_, where two people's lives were ruined, but the bet was won. But she doesn't mean to scare me. She has no filter between her thoughts and her mouth, which is always in gear.
She scares me, though the doctors always say they know of no cause for these things. We've lived in this house five years, prices in the area have plummeted, and my husband won't abandon it and lose his money. Whenever I mention this possibility to people, everybody including the doctors pooh-poohs it, but I remember how badly my asthma and headaches compounded when we flea-bombed the house--twice. And how eager the woman who sold the house to us was to get rid of it, allowing us to assume her loan with no money down.
And so I panic as I lie down in the bedroom. Perhaps I should just cover up my head and pray some more.
# # #
By the end of February, I'm feverish and nauseated and achy.
I complain to my nurse.
"You've had a little virus."
That's the pronouncement. "It's not the radiation. Have you had a bad headache yet?"
A "bad" headache is one that you'd cut off your head to stop, because it's unbearable. Like some migraines, patients stand on their heads or beat them against the wall to try to dull the pain. If one of these beasties occurs, you take the steroids that were prescribed to stop the brain swelling it may indicate. Clear enough?
Flu or whatever it is, I'm nauseated this week and can't keep much on the stomach. They suggest Ensure or another liquid drink. I can't stand that stuff and merely nod. Lost four pounds, though. That part I like. The "morning sickness tummy" I don't. But only 7 more treatments to go!
And I stubbornly didn't develop bald patches as predicted, but did experience overall thinning on top, which I guess I can live with. Dr. Genius said it ain't over until it's over, though. He is proud of that "horseshoe" hairstyle of his, so when I express fears of being partially bald for a while, he giggles.
When I mention a new "lump" behind my ear, his face distorts. The professional "doctor" veil descends and he practically grabs at my head to see. Then he breathes a sigh of relief. "It's nothing. We'll watch it. It's probably from pressing on the "helmet" or neckrest." He's a worrier, so I guess it's just the pinching between the rest and the "mask." It goes away on the weekends (or gets smaller).
# # #
Only one more session. Last day in the mouth of the dragon.
The doctor and I have our final consultation. I have a few blind spots, but nothing big enough to be consciously aware of. They said Tuesday that I can drive! HOORAY!! No picking up anything heavier than ten pounds, and no bending over, though.
"As I say to all my patients, I hope I never see you again," he says, shaking my hand. He's smiling. I'm a success story.
# # #
So many people called me during this episode in my life and said, "Hey, I'm praying for you." That's what has brought me through this "sort of without a scratch." If you believe, you've probably felt this at some time in your own life. For some reason, when I said I needed more time and wanted a mission in life, I got a "Yes!" answer to prayer. I don't yet know what this mission is going to be-- It's kind of like walking through the swamp in the dark; you'd like to have a map and a stated goal, but that's just not what the Lord is going to provide. He for whatever reason expects to have you standing there just trusting that He'll tell you when and where to step next. You wish for "a flashlight unto my feet," as the child in Sunday School accidentally misquoted. Meantime, you just keep learning and walking and praying and trying to improve your mind and help others however you can. That's the best take on it I have so far, as of tonight. . . .
Why me? Why you? Why anybody?
Why _not_ us?
We'll all know the reason, soon enough.
# # #
April.
Closure.
There's no such thing. But I had my final follow-up visit with the doctor. The building seems unfamiliar now. It all seems so far away that it must have been somebody else lying on the steel table, enduring the endless burning beam. I have a blister behind my ear where that lump had been, but it's supposedly just from irritation.
On impulse, I asked him what the chances were that it hadn't worked. "I'd say between 15 and 20 percent." I wished I hadn't asked. I said, "Then we just have to keep the positive attitude." He smiled and said he was sure I was all right, and I should call him with any questions. I will be in the lucky 80 percent this time because I WILL be. I know I am.
Lucky, I mean.
On second thought, what a depressing subject for a memoir--or anything else!
THE ZAP PALACE
They say this is a safe and healing place, just like home. If you live at 13 Chernobyl Place.
Radiation Therapy 3 is where they do all the "head cases." It is to be "my" machine.
When they lay me on that table, they're constantly telling me "just hold still." But then, they're walking OUTSIDE the several feet of concrete and that lead door that goes "boom" when it closes, and I'm in here alone.
With my head in the mouth of the dragon.
Did you know that those _CAUTION RADIATION AREA_ signs on the doors that lead back here are required by law? They must be on any doors opening to areas exposing personnel to >= 5 millirads per hour. I worry about my nurses, techs, and doctors in 20 years.
Steroids make my face puff out. I look like Miss Piggy, only not nearly as pretty.
The skin on my forehead feels mushy-crunchy to the touch, like a Styrofoam packing peanut. I tell my nurse when she asks that yes, my scalp and head feel funny. Sometimes I get weird pains, but mostly it's a surface thing--okay, frankly, it itches like lice crawling around. I know this is an accurate simile because in college, several of us in my church group came back from a mission trip with passengers . . . head lice. We all used that lice shampoo with Lindane, leaving it on our heads for several minutes. I can't help wondering whether this caused my current problem, or at least aggravated it. Or, I theorize it could be from the hexachlorophene in the pHisohex I used to bathe in as a child to treat bladder infections. What does it matter? All that matters now is to get rid of it.
I go in for radiation at 10 every morning for the next five weeks, weekends off. There are to be 25 treatments of around 180 rads, which is the safe level according to whatever it's according to, but which kills the weak "bad" cells that would be at risk for starting up this problem again. Strange that, though it's benign, this is a case of a part of your own body programmed to rise up and take over like a megalomaniac; it does not understand that if it gets greedy and kills you, the host, it kills itself! Duh!
Last week, I helped with an art project: they made my mask. It's a sort of grid-screen thing that they shape to your face, hard plastic stuff. The first few times they strapped on the mask and bolted it to the table, with my nose firmly squashed where the plastic grid had been molded around it, I had a huge asthma attack. "Hold still! You have to keep still," urged the well-meaning technician. I was trying not to freak out, knowing I had to be brave.
They did simulation the first week, which means they just took CT film, an x-ray, but they turned on the positioning laser. It's just the weirdest thing you can imagine. Until you actually have the first treatment with that huge friendly dragon.
All you can do is lie there and pray.
I can't see to drive, and besides I'm in no mental shape to navigate the expressways of Dallas. My elderly mother is driving me to and from the radiation that just started Monday. They changed my "treatment plan" several times at the radiation therapy place, trying to figure out just how to get the best shot at the sneaky underside of the gland, where the recurrence came from. The usual "ports" at temples and in front of ears reach the top and middle of the gland's lobes, but don't really concentrate on the anterior lobe. They're now doing a "flying wedge," where they DO shoot the beam through "thinking parts," but they reassured me it was best because it used a small dose in each of the locations through which it rotated.
The first day of treatments, I balked. The headrest that my first treatment tech assured me was "mine" was missing. They decided to use a shorter one but I refused. In simulation, they directed the beam to an area smaller than an English pea and we couldn’t have the beam be off or too close to my optic nerve! I pulled open the drawer where the other tech stashed "my" headrest. It was empty. The nurse told me it was okay and just to get on the table. Prayer must bend the beam, I told the Lord.
The next day they put the same headrest on there and I realized that the day before this thing had been UPSIDE DOWN. That was why it was so apparent that it was inches lower and so forth.
The lasting effect is that I developed a variable blind spot in the lower left quadrant of my eye. Bastards. I told them that headrest was wrong. Should have walked out, but they insisted I was just hysterical. One day would not have mattered. (The blind spot is there when I'm tired and when I first wake up. It sometimes is "branches" of a white light or little Morse-code type flashes, over some visual area but it's not normal, ever. Did I mention this is MY body, not their Hurry-Up People Are Waiting thing? Sigh.)
The asthma attacks I had the first three times inside the "vault" have gotten milder, and maybe I won't feel freaked out at all by next week, when the hair loss and fatigue set in. The doctor and two of the technicians are balding, and they just laugh when I express concern about having a bald "headband," a sideways Mohawk. It's pride, foolish pride. What's important is that my head doesn't fall off.
One morning as I paced, dizzy, in the staging area where patients wait for the machine, the woman just treated in "my" machine walked out, tottered over to the trash can next to the water cooler, and started vomiting. Everyone from patients to medical staff acted as though this were perfectly normal.
There's a little boy here who can't be more than five years old, here with his grandmother. I pray that they're here with someone else, but then I see the purple X inked on his Adam's apple. I can't stop crying as I bash through the double doors with the CAUTION RADIATION AREA on them. I don't want to find out what's wrong with him.
Later on my mother and his grandmother talk in the waiting room. He has a twin sister at home and five other sisters and brothers, all under twelve. His mother couldn't bring him because she's taking care of them all on welfare. No word on the daddy. He says the worst part for him is that he's so lonesome. He misses his twin. But he's enjoying the Ronald McDonald house. He's never been in such a big city.
This gorgeous little blonde child. I never could have any children.
He's so brave. I, on the other hand, am a chickenshit coward.
I'm a terrible patient.
Did you know I have a physicist? The coefficients that are typed into the machine are different for each patient. The dose is figured by your very own physicist. Hell, maybe I should've majored in physics, and then I might've been the one figuring the unlucky people's doses instead of getting one.
These big orange radiation signs scare everybody who walks into the Cancer Center building, especially the patients. Even those of us, like me, who don't have cancer, but have one of the benign conditions that can be best treated with radiation. This is all explained in the booklets they give you at the Radiation Therapy center.
Of course I don't call it that. I call it the Zap Palace.
I have radiation sickness.
(Urp.)
Not like the Japanese at ground-zero-plus-some, of course. Just a little nausea before and after I eat (something nice and bland like saltine crackers or Nabs Peanut Butter Orange Crackers That Look Artificial But Have Protein And Don't Make Me Hurl . . . and between times a glass of 7-UP or a Slurpee or some frozen yogurt or ice cream). It's not like they're going to run the Geiger counter over me like in "Project X From Outer Space," and say, "She's full of crickets," or anything. But it's kind of icky.
Don't let anyone tell you're not going to be nauseated when you have radiation therapy. Oh, I know why they tell you "it depends": they're hoping that if they don't suggest it, you will escape it. But I didn't escape it, even though my particle beam didn't go anywhere near my innards; it went to the center of my head.
But I'm still nauseated, whether I eat or not.
That's just a function of being seven treatments away from the last one, yay!, with the "full safe dose." Hmm. And just what IS the safety of this dose, Doctor? Care to join me in the lead-lined room with 6-ft walls of concrete at the end of the tunnel with the solid lead doors? No, thanks. We'll just watch from our monitors out here down the hall. . . . (and that's only the technicians. The docs just read the film from further downhall. Hee!)
No, I'm not starting to doubt it all. Tell you what, when you're on the table and it's in position and your head is strapped in position ("keep your chin up in that mask, now...don't move. . . here we go!) and they leave, and then you hear the lead door bonk shut, you and God are in there alone.
So you just lie there and whisper prayers, telling the Lord how thankful you are that He's in control, and that you trust Him to guide that beam where He wants it to go, only to any "bad" places and cells, and protecting your optic nerve(s) and brain parts; you keep calm and don't fall off the table and feel like it went to the proper place.
Then the ambient light comes back on, and the table whirrs and hums and ratchets down and forward a few feet, and the door unlocks and opens, and one of your two techs comes into the room and takes the "helmet" mask thing off your head. "That's all for today." You sit up like it was just some normal thing, feel your head about to fall off but then it gets OK, just a little light-headed and tender, but you can walk down the hall and keep your head on the leash. . . .your head, the balloon you pull along, bouncing against the ceiling.
I try to tell them I'm not having those leg jerks and attacks of "the shakes" all over my body on purpose. My brain doesn't want to be zapped. It’s all you can do to lie there. After all, this is the brain . . . where I live.
If only it were your foot or your butt or anything but your brain getting the dose, it wouldn't be so bad. You only have the one brain. And when you live the life of the mind and aren't athletic and can't sew or do crafts and can't have children, you sort of hate to think that your brain might get fried. It makes it difficult not to have rigors, but I manage to hold still.
It's weird, but when they don't come in to get me right away after the final beam darkens, I can get panicky. What if they've forgotten me? They'll just leave me in here, strapped down, until they remember.
I know, intellectually, that they have more patients lined up to come in, and so there wouldn't be much of a delay. But by then I'd have died of this panic, rapid heartbeat, freakout. Sometimes I shout, and they come bursting in as quickly as the lead door will open. "We're only waiting for the film. You're all right."
I never can get across to them that if they'd just touch me with one hand or something, I could calm down and wait a few more minutes. I hate to think how that would mess up their training, the distance they have to keep. I don't know how they can do this every day. You have to admire them. Why do we have parades for sports "heroes"? These are the heroes and heroines.
As I make my way down the inner hall, a clump of chestnut hair floats off the woman in front of me onto the floor. Everybody else accepts this as normal. I step around it.
The patient before me, a woman I have greeted daily as she walked out of the treatment area as I went in, didn't show today. I do not know whether she quit or got sick. Later someone mentions that some people die from the radiation before they can complete their treatments. This makes me feel so much better. . . .
Visualization.
Several people who've come through a serious illness have told me that attitude and visualization are the most powerful tools we have. Wherever I am, I just close my eyes and begin.
I am visualizing the rubbery green men of the clean-up crew in my body. They look kind of like a lighter-skinned Gumby. They spend their time stomping around in the port-selected areas of my braincase and body. They scrape up any cells that look abnormal, and, with their silver ice-cream-scoops, they pack them into steel buckets. When the buckets get full, they seal the tops and jump into the bloodstream, which floats them down to eliminate the buckets. Then they come back up where the white cells scavenge the healthy tissue left for any specks. Meanwhile, the rubbery Gumbys are stretching themselves around anyplace where cells should be and aren't, or are dying or missing, and they replace the tissue while it heals around them. They replace the function and make the healing complete. _Let this be a metaphor for the healing my body is receiving._
Mama says she thinks something in our house caused this. Environmental factors. She says, without thinking, "If this comes back on you in six months, then I'll know I'm right, and I'll have the last word with your husband." Well, that reminds me of the one-dollar bet in the film _Trading Places_, where two people's lives were ruined, but the bet was won. But she doesn't mean to scare me. She has no filter between her thoughts and her mouth, which is always in gear.
She scares me, though the doctors always say they know of no cause for these things. We've lived in this house five years, prices in the area have plummeted, and my husband won't abandon it and lose his money. Whenever I mention this possibility to people, everybody including the doctors pooh-poohs it, but I remember how badly my asthma and headaches compounded when we flea-bombed the house--twice. And how eager the woman who sold the house to us was to get rid of it, allowing us to assume her loan with no money down.
And so I panic as I lie down in the bedroom. Perhaps I should just cover up my head and pray some more.
By the end of February, I'm feverish and nauseated and achy.
I complain to my nurse.
"You've had a little virus."
That's the pronouncement. "It's not the radiation. Have you had a bad headache yet?"
A "bad" headache is one that you'd cut off your head to stop, because it's unbearable. Like some migraines, patients stand on their heads or beat them against the wall to try to dull the pain. If one of these beasties occurs, you take the steroids that were prescribed to stop the brain swelling it may indicate. Clear enough?
Flu or whatever it is, I'm nauseated this week and can't keep much on the stomach. They suggest Ensure or another liquid drink. I can't stand that stuff and merely nod. Lost four pounds, though. That part I like. The "morning sickness tummy" I don't. But only 7 more treatments to go!
And I stubbornly didn't develop bald patches as predicted, but did experience overall thinning on top, which I guess I can live with. Dr. Genius said it ain't over until it's over, though. He is proud of that "horseshoe" hairstyle of his, so when I express fears of being partially bald for a while, he giggles.
When I mention a new "lump" behind my ear, his face distorts. The professional "doctor" veil descends and he practically grabs at my head to see. Then he breathes a sigh of relief. "It's nothing. We'll watch it. It's probably from pressing on the "helmet" or neckrest." He's a worrier, so I guess it's just the pinching between the rest and the "mask." It goes away on the weekends (or gets smaller).
Only one more session. Last day in the mouth of the dragon.
The doctor and I have our final consultation. I have a few blind spots, but nothing big enough to be consciously aware of. They said Tuesday that I can drive! HOORAY!! No picking up anything heavier than ten pounds, and no bending over, though.
"As I say to all my patients, I hope I never see you again," he says, shaking my hand. He's smiling. I'm a success story.
So many people called me during this episode in my life and said, "Hey, I'm praying for you." That's what has brought me through this "sort of without a scratch." If you believe, you've probably felt this at some time in your own life. For some reason, when I said I needed more time and wanted a mission in life, I got a "Yes!" answer to prayer. I don't yet know what this mission is going to be-- It's kind of like walking through the swamp in the dark; you'd like to have a map and a stated goal, but that's just not what the Lord is going to provide. He for whatever reason expects to have you standing there just trusting that He'll tell you when and where to step next. You wish for "a flashlight unto my feet," as the child in Sunday School accidentally misquoted. Meantime, you just keep learning and walking and praying and trying to improve your mind and help others however you can. That's the best take on it I have so far, as of tonight. . . .
Why me? Why you? Why anybody?
Why _not_ us?
We'll all know the reason, soon enough.
April.
Closure.
There's no such thing. But I had my final follow-up visit with the doctor. The building seems unfamiliar now. It all seems so far away that it must have been somebody else lying on the steel table, enduring the endless burning beam. I have a blister behind my ear where that lump had been, but it's supposedly just from irritation.
On impulse, I asked him what the chances were that it hadn't worked. "I'd say between 15 and 20 percent." I wished I hadn't asked. I said, "Then we just have to keep the positive attitude." He smiled and said he was sure I was all right, and I should call him with any questions. I will be in the lucky 80 percent this time because I WILL be. I know I am.
Lucky, I mean.
On second thought, what a depressing subject for a memoir--or anything else!
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