I'm Radioactive

I'm off.

I have driven by the cancer center office on MLK for years. I first noticed it in 2006 when Annabelle and I found ourselves getting to know this neighborhood well when my mother moved into The Christopher House hospice, in April of 2006. MLK is in East Austin - which used to be thought of ("Thought of" can be a hilarious idea, right? By whom? White people/suburbanites/saltines - that's who. Me.) as the "bad" part of town (read: black and Mexican) back in the whatever decades. Now this is the tragically hip part of town where we reside. This gentrification (rape?) concept is a whole other topic - likely more valid than my topic - but I'm not addressing it (much) here, now, as I am today writing about my experience as a patient of radiation.

So anyway - I know the location of this cancer office /radiation place like the back of my hand. I drove by it a lot that one week before my mom died and averted my eyes, thinking, yuck, so glad I don't have to go THERE, to a horrible CANCER place. Only other people go there. The other. Others. Not me. Not us. The other. 

And now that we live within striking distance of this place, I've been driving down MLK several times a week for 10 months and I know exactly where this place is by heart. 

Austin Cancer Centers - Central Austin. Radiation Oncology
2600 E. Martin Luther King Jr.

But today, I got lost.  Waylaid on the one mile drive there. I drove down the wrong street, made a wrong turn and became disoriented. I felt backwards and dreamy.

Then I arrived and parked. Next door in the playground of an elementary school a little girl screamed. She then screamed again and stopped she then started screaming hysterically again over and over and over again. I looked but could not see who she was or if there were any adults. Then it was quiet. I walked in to the cancer office and started to play my part. The part I had in this particular play was pretty familiar to me: walk in, smile, say hello, and sign my name on the sheet to say that I had arrived. I wrote "Austin Cancer Centers" instead of "Amy Adams" in the space designated for patient name. 

These actions betray me.

I was greeted by a pretty young lady named Allison, who took me down a very long hallway, and then another very long hallway to a dim cave location inside the huge square building. I then signed away my safety, perhaps, on a form that specified the dangers of radiation. I asked her to make a copy so I could read it later. 

She then removed my custom crunchy blue paper pillow from a secret location and showed it to me. I took a picture. Then she took me to a little changing area which is just a 2' x 2' corner of a 30' x 30' room with a hilarious shower curtain sort of arrangement contraption on the ceiling. I was told to take off my bra, shirt, and necklace to put on a pillowcase. Put on a pillowcase? Well, pick up a pillowcase and hug it in front of you and then walk out into the big room. Like walking onto a stage. The pillowcases were extremely white, beautiful, gleaming, and ironed stiff. In a perfect, tight, neat, beautiful stack. Crisp. Square. They're absolutely gorgeous. Martha Stewart could use them as table napkins to host a royal wedding.

I donned (hugged) my gleaming white pillowcase and came out from behind the curtain. She led me to a large long thin table that was about six feet away from a huge roboty/spaceshippy machine that has a vaguely human hugging aspect. At the head of the table my blue crunchy paper pillow was waiting for me. I lay down upon it on and raised my arms back into the position that I had first formed when I made the indent in the pillow a week or so ago. It didn't feel as comfortable as I thought it would. Had my body changed shape? Allison put a large triangle pillow under my knees.

After you are arranged on the table and ready to go, the whole table with you on it is magically backed up so that you were underneath the robotic robotic arms of the big machine and it can do its magical radiation stuff on you:

After Allison had me lay down, Kevin came into the room. He and Allison explained to me that they would be taking some images, and then coming in the room to draw with a black marker, around the "treatment area." I contain areas. After fussing around with lining me up correctly they would give me another tattoo. Or if I were I undelighted by the prospect of another tattoo, I could have a special kind of tape but it would be sort of hard to keep that on for four weeks. I decided to have another tattoo. Did not hurt.

Kevin gently scooted me around hither and yither and then said not to move. They went into another room, and the table I was lying on jerked smoothly backwards so that I found myself underneath the machine. Welcome to the machine. I did not move, except to breathe. I found myself breathing very shallowly because I was worried that if I took a deep breath it would move my chest around too much and the radiation would possibly not hit the right areas, and maybe even hit an area that it shouldn't hit like my lungs or my heart. Finally I had to take a deep breath. 

Each inhale made the pillowcase on me scoot around a little bit. It was folded up so my left breast was exposed and it was sort of hanging off the right side of my chest and I feared that if I took too many more breaths the whole thing would fall off. Not that I would mind, but it was a bit cold in there. What is the pillowcase versus breathing etiquette for such a situation? It held.

Way above me 12 to 16 of the ceiling panels had been removed, and replaced with beautiful backlit pictures of trees, as if I were looking up into a blue sunny sky through some pink budding and white budding trees. But really, I wasn't. 

I lay still, anticipating. Across my right horizon came a curved gray huge metal flat thing that rotated over me and went in and out of my sight. The machine hummed funny noises. I think they were taking images. After about five minutes of this, Kevin came back into the room and he said he needed to draw the treatment area on me with a pen. This seems incredibly Fred Flintstoney - to draw on me with a felt tip pen - after all this high-tech computer imaging x-Ray radiation lasers magic oncology tattoos computer programming physicists 21st-century stuff. Another bit of the dadaism that is my life. With an extremely gentle touch he drew a dotted line on my skin under my arm under my breast, and up the middle of my chest. It felt like a kitten. It tickled.

They then left me in the cold room by myself. Time for action. A two foot-ish wide glass plated flat machine robotic thing (like a flat TV screen) came into the right side of my vision and stopped. It then hummed and moved machine-like-ishly closer and closer and closer to my chest. It was a little bit scary, and I was wondering if it was going to stop or crush me to death while I lay there passively, arms over my head, naked, sticking my chest up into its arriving crush. I imagined that maybe all the radiologists in the hall had dropped dead from some poisonous gas, and aliens were secretly taking over and were using the machine to crush me. But that didn't happen. 

My head was tilted to the right, in its crunchy pillow, and I was not supposed to move. I peered sideways up into the glass front of this machine face thing that had descended unto me, and I could see myself reflected in it, and beyond my reflection I could see into it - like looking into a metallic mouth. In the reflection I could see a red thin line of laser light going across the bones of my ribs underneath my breast. Then I heard a loud humming sound. I think this was the actual radiation. It seemed that my left breast kind of hurt or tingled during this time but I think that was psychological. 

Inside the glass of this machine, there were slotted stacked thin strips of oily metal, like louvers or a fence - hundreds of them, each a tenth of an inch thick and about ten inches tall, with segments that could come apart, stacked next to each other. This was a fleeting glance - my guesses may be off. They moved together sort of like teeth - or a curtain - they opened and closed mechanically sideways and by section, and at one point they split balletically, clickingly (vaguely Martian) into the shape of a flat half circle. Into that arched hole I could see nothing but black. I wonder if this arch was sort of like the shape of my breast and the metal teeth things had opened, like the shutter of a camera, to allow the radiation to my treatment area? This visage reminded me of the mouth of the creature in the movie Alien. I closed my eyes.

I will do sixteen sessions like this. After those, I will do four more sessions that are called boost sessions, that will not radiate the entire breast, but will be focused more intensely with more energy, just to the inside of me where the tumor used to be in my breast. Most of these will be at 10 o'clock in the morning with a few exceptions.

I put my regular clothes back on, although I hear that pretty soon I will not be able to do this because of pain. That it will be nicest for me to go topless. Right now the whole breast feels kind of humming. Hurts a tiny bit or maybe it just feels sorry for itself stupidly. Again I don't know if this is psychological or physical. 

I feel a little off, a little queasy, a little spacey. 

My mind is constantly humming with music, it is my blood. So of course today my brain is flooded with the song "Radioactive," by Imagine Dragons. It is playing constantly in my brain, plug your iPod in to me if you want to hear me

I'm waking up to ash and dust

I wipe my brow and I sweat my rust

I'm breathing in the chemicals

I'm breaking in, shaping up, then checking out on the prison bus

This is it, the apocalypse

Whoa

I'm waking up, I feel it in my bones

Enough to make my systems blow

Welcome to the new age, to the new age

Welcome to the new age, to the new age

Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh, whoa, oh, oh, oh, I'm radioactive, radioactive

Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh, whoa, oh, oh, oh, I'm radioactive, radioactive

I raise my flags, don my clothes

It's a revolution, I suppose

We'll paint it red to fit right in

Whoa

I'm breaking in, shaping up, then checking out on the prison bus

This is it, the apocalypse

Whoa

I'm waking up, I feel it in my bones

Enough to make my systems blow

Welcome to the new age, to the new age

Welcome to the new age, to the new age

Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh, whoa, oh, oh, oh, I'm radioactive, radioactive

Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh, whoa, oh, oh, oh, I'm radioactive, radioactive

All systems go, the sun hasn't died

Deep in my bones, straight from inside

I'm waking up, I feel it in my bones

Enough to make my systems blow

Welcome to the new age, to the new age

Welcome to the new age, to the new age

Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh, whoa, oh, oh, oh, I'm radioactive, radioactive