The geometry of cancer

Yes Virginia, you do need your geometry lessons. Geometry is an integral part of cancer treatment when using radiation because the doctors need to analyze the terrain (your body) and determine literal angles of attack.

In reality the universe has no geometry. --Kedar Joshi

Radiation exits the machine in the form of x-rays which are shot out in a perfectly straight line from point A to point B. They magically go right through almost anything. Hmmmmm...this seems a little suspect because they must not go through every substance in the universe or go on forever - otherwise the x-Ray somebody gets on the other side of the world would travel all away through the earth and zap you today while you're eating your tuna sub at Thundercloud Subs. I better look into this more since I obviously don't know what I'm talking about. 

Back to angles.

X-rays are straight. If the death rays were shot straight down at my breast from above, they'd hit and kill their target but then continue through my body and also zap my heart, lungs, bones, and other useful innards, thus extinguishing my me and negating the whole purpose. Let's just say - it'd kill ya. So they shoot the radiation in from the sides of the breast, trying as best as they can to have the killer rays go through the blob sitting on top of the ribcage...using geometry and art to get the rays to go as low low down to the rib as they can while still trying not to radiate any bone or lung or heart. 

There are several problems to be worked out geometrically mathematically emotionally mythically mentally psychologically though:

1. X-rays scatter a bit - they can be unruly preschoolers and a few may ricochet or freak out and ping pong around inside you willy nilly if they want to and no one knows if or where. So I will have some lung/heart/something else zapped - most likely. What if one x-ray bounces off a diamond chip somehow embedded in my breast and is sent shooting down at the speed of light internally inwardly through my body and it fries a little one celled organism in my gut - the one that was in charge of the probiotic army, the general, and then all the other troops die of depression and my guts explode with rot? Probably won't happen. But what will?

2. When the x-Ray thingy is on my right side trying to hit me at an angle across my cleavage down to exit around my underarm, the angle is so flat (obtuse?) that the rays go through the skin at an extreme angle (meaning MORE skin - imagine a highly diagonal bevel concept) AND they tend to "skitter" across the surface, so that this area gets much more irritated. I must confess, I was glad when the doctor explained this to me, because I was starting to wonder what in the world was wrong with my skin there because it looks dégoûtant as they say in French.

If they wanted textbook example of this they could take a picture of my chest. 

I'm showing you just a tiny bit of it in the picture I post here, I don't want to be too rated R for a blog, a family blog. Ha ha, what family reads this? And I don't want to scare you. The polite narrator.

There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry. -- Martin Gardner

I have just completed my 15th radiation session. Five more to go. I'm getting to know the staff at my radiation clinic, and they are good people. Kimberly always smiles and has the grace to recall who I am every day when I walk through the door. I know I'm just one of hundreds or thousands of patients to go through the revolving door of her life, but to me, she is unique - a once in a lifetime (I hope) radiation oncology nurse. I wonder if she knows how important she is in the minds of the patients that she sees?  

Notes from inside the radiation room:

1. There are no windows in the radiation room. 

2. It is very fridgey cold in the radiation room. Is it part of the mystery of medicine to make the patients so cold and uncomfortable that they feel isolated, and are not warm enough to think very well or ask too many questions? This keeps the patients docile I think. Everywhere I go in this guise the room is out to freeze me. This room is no exception.

3. The door to the radiation room is about 15 or 18 inches thick, and it has scary danger signs on it. Warning warning, and I'm all like yeah.

4. After I have been set up and wiggled about and my bed raised up, like I'm a cheese toast being placed just so under a broiler, the technicians/magicians say to each other "925" in conspiratorial tones, and then they exit the room and close the door. 925 is my special number they say - part of the prescription, the recipe for just me - and relates to the distance between me and the machine. When I hear this I think of looking for a stamp on silver jewelry in 1978 in Mexico City, to prove that it was at least 92.5% real silver. Pure. I'm pure silver.

5. Once the techy people walk out it's lonely like outer space. I'm not to move, even my head, so I can't see around me. I feel very alone. At this point the roomness of the room recedes and I am in an ocean or a tomb or a womb or a spaceship. I am all alone in the casket of the radiation room which is down a long dark hallway in the building, which is in an ugly parking lot set off from the street, which is a long street on the east side of Austin. I'm way inside the Russian doll complex of complexities about to meet the machine. And I'm totally isolated, cold, silent.

Kimberly said she read my blog yesterday and that it was interesting to see the patient's point of view. I told her I was going to revolutionize radiation oncology -  probably not true - but I do have a few ideas. How about if doctors and clinicians took off their shirts and laid bare chested on a table for about 10 minutes while both gendered stranger people walked around and arranged pillowcases on them, and moved their bodies up and down in a freezing cold room while trying to match up little dots tattooed on their floppy non sexual bodies to X-shaped red laser lights that are shooting at them from the walls and the ceiling? That would provide another angle. Maybe they all already do this and I don't know. 

I don't know.

Kimberly has something that many people I've encountered along this way, the cancer way, do not have: the human touch. The last thing she does before she leaves the room to seal me in the submarine death ray chamber, is to put her hand firmly on me - my shoulder or my leg - and say something in a calm kind voice. This is more reassuring than anything. Doctors could learn from her.

I am now starting to not love radiation. 

My friend had 33 sessions of radiation. I ask her about it, as I do my other co-breast-cancer friends. I don't know why some of us have more radiation sessions than others, I think it has to do with the dosage. I may be getting the same dosage in fewer sessions, but I'm not sure. Anyway she said that for the last week or so of her radiation she literally had to wear no clothing on her chest, she had to go topless, so she didn't really go anywhere. Like out. Her skin was actually coming off. It was too painful to wear anything so she lived topless at home, and would just drape something strategically around her neck to cover her chest when she would get a ride to radiation. I am nowhere near that bad yet, but I can see that it might be coming. My left nipple looks like it's melting off of me. And the skin on my mid chest area is horrible. I saw the doctor the other day and she says this has to do with the perpendicularity of the rays.

Geometry.

A figure with curves always offers a lot of interesting angles. -- Wesley Ruggles

This same friend who also had similar chemo as I did, is in physical therapy cuz she had a mastectomy and she noticed that she could barely run without feeling dreadful so they measured her oxygen level on a treadmill and noticed she could not get the oxygen over 96 (should be 99-100). The PT said she should be careful about aerobic exercise because her lungs and heart don't work as well as they used to apparently - and the therapist said "Oh yes we see this after chemo all the time." And she was athletic. Is athletic.

In other words - it's hard to know what all after effects anyone will have from chemo, or when they'll show up, or how long they'll stay. Or from radiation. Or four surgeries. What weirdo effects will I have, what do I already have? What chemical time bomb is ticking or not? What radiated particle will mutate later in a bad way? Or not? Right now I'm so tired it's hard to sit up - is that from chemo? Radiation? Dull laziness? Menopause? Depression? Is it fake? And why is that pleurisy thing popping up? It keeps coming back every few days and I swat it away with other chemistry and tonic. Am I permanently altered? Or looking for excuses for my sloth? All.

Am I obtuse or acute? How do I measure the time of this? How far is the arc?

My Dog Practices Geometry

BY CATHRYN ESSINGER

I do not understand the poets who tell me

that I should not personify. Every morning

the willow auditions for a new role

outside my bedroom window—today she is

Clytemnestra; yesterday a Southern Belle,

lost in her own melodrama, sinking on her skirts.

Nor do I like the mathematicians who tell me

I cannot say, "The zinnias are counting on their

fingers," or "The dog is practicing her geometry,"

even though every day I watch her using

the yard's big maple as the apex of a triangle

from which she bisects the circumference

of the lawn until she finds the place where

the rabbit has escaped, or the squirrel upped

the ante by climbing into a new Euclidian plane.

She stumbles across the lawn, eyes pulling

her feet along, gaze fixed on a rodent working

the maze of the oak as if it were his own invention,

her feet tangling in the roots of trees, and tripping,

yes, even over themselves, until I go out to assist,

by pointing at the squirrel, and repeating, "There!

There!" But instead of following my outstretched

arm to the crown of the tree, where the animal is

now lounging under a canopy of leaves,

catching its breath, charting its next escape,

she looks to my mouth, eager to read my lips,

confident that I—who can bring her home

from across the field with a word, who

can speak for the willow and the zinnia—

can surely charm a squirrel down from a tree.

No one knows why

No one knows why.

Anything.

Monday was day 13 out of 20 of my radiation treatments. Friends ask how I'm feeling, and I really don't have a brilliant answer. I'm not as tired as I thought I would be, yet I have no energy. That doesn't really make sense does it? Well hey, that kind of goes along with my whole theme about Dadaism doesn't it?

I'm all over the place. I'm too tired to walk up the stairs but I can't sleep at night. I'm messed up. 

No one knows why.

I am an ironing board. Someone placed an iron on me so that they could prepare the linens for a fancy tea with the queen. The queen of malcontent. The iron is heated to cotton and placed down very precisely so that you can see the sharp outline where its heat scorches.  The edges where radiation is "on" versus "off" are clearly demarcated - as clear as the borders drawn on a map. It's rather fascinating actually. My skin is a map. Apparently they can focus the x-rays very precisely, so sharply that their journey leaves a sharp shadow on the skin, although some of them supposedly scatter and bounce once they get inside your body and ricochet off in heart or lung or stomach or neck or brain directions. I try not to think about that too much. 

My radiation is called external beam. Meaning simply that it is beamed through me from outside me. From a Godzilla sized metal toaster truck continent object. Welcome to the machine. 

Sometimes cancer patients have little tiny radioactive things (Seeds? Astronauts? Ships? Rice Crispies?) actually surgically STUCK IN to their bodies, where the thing sits and emits death rays from within. Kind of like how in Black Christmas the killer was inside the house. Then it's removed. For me I travel to the external beam beamer once a day. It zaps me and then turns off. When I walk out I'm not radioactive. Don't worry.

My treatment is some new protocol test thing where I get lots of external zaps in fewer times than they used to - 20 sessions as opposed to 35 or 40.   Why? I forgot. You think when you get a cancer diagnosis that you are going to continue to sit on the edge of your chair and listen raptly to every single word that falls out of your doctors' mouths when they talk, but what you don't realize is that this is fatiguing and after a while you don't remember much of anything and you don't pay attention. You become kind of eighth grade.

No one knows why.

Radiation is only five minutes a day - or if you really want to get specific it's more like 47 seconds a day. My breast is vibrating and hot and sore inside and out. The actual breast is bright pink, but the skin to the left of it on my chest, the part that showed when I was wearing a bikini back in the 70s looks really awful. I think this must be related to old sunburns from the past - those ignorant years of living a mile closer to the sun while being blond and slathering on orange greasy wonderful smelling Bain de Soleil, not regarding or knowing about sun damage / skin cancer / crocodile dullness. My cleavage et environs is reacting more ouchfully and uglificationishly to this radiating onslaught than the skin that was nestled away behind a bathing suit, because it's already half dead I guess. 

It's not nice, this décolletage skin bubbling like it was deep fried or had kind of bad burn. Or maybe like I splattered french fry oil on it while working at McDonald's topless. Little bubbling red festering blisters. It was hurting enough on Friday that I pulled my shirt down off of my shoulder and held my seatbelt away from my body with my left hand while I was driving, but I think two days off over weekend made that abate. 

No one knows why.

Now it itches and looks disgusting like plague boils - and nothing can be done really. Yes they give you cream. Here ma'am would you like a free sample of some cream? Some lovely all natural cream? Like all other skin creams, I don't think that this stuff actually does anything. I mean seriously. Have you ever in your entire life put cream on itchy irritated skin where it had any effect at all, whatsoever? I don't think so. I think that entire industry is a big fat scam. Kind of like the Tum's industry or the Tylenol industry. Have you ever taken a Tum's that actually made your stomach stop hurting? Have ever taken a Tylenol that actually relieved any of your pain? I call these industries out! Go away and do something else you large corporate boxes full of large vats of useless chemical nothing!

Yes of course it feels kind of cooling when you apply said cream but the same thing would be true if it were yogurt or chilled Jell-O or mud, right? It feels good for 1.3 seconds and then it goes right back to itching like mad. 

No one knows why.

I'm not a doctor and I don't play one on TV but I am stuffing my head with knowledge about cancer. I don't know if this is making me smarter or more scared, but I do love the information so I eat it all up. Radiation is actually one of the most effective (okay let's just say it, it is THE most effective) treatments against cancer that we know. 

No one knows why.

Here's what happens: All of the cells inside and out of the radiated area (read - left boob and surrounding suburbs) will die, but then new ones will be born as the cells repair themselves one rickety molecule at a time. But - the cancer cells won't be able to repair themselves. They are evil dictators, but even an evil dictator has a weakness, and in the case of the cancer cell the weakness lies in the fact that once the dictator takes over, he can't repair his body if he gets sick and dies. No one knows why.

So goodness does win out, just like in Harry Potter, the good cells can repair themselves once they're killed but the bad ones can't. That's kind of hopeful I think. Here's a quote from the doctor about this phenomenon: "No one knows why." I know I just said that but it bears repeating.

No one knows why.

We do have a cure for cancer. They could radiate your whole body and KILL ALL CANCER FOR SURE - except it'd kill you too.

Now it's Tuesday morning, after a long night of very heavy rain that scared Fiona so much that nobody in our home got much sleep till after 3 AM. My radiation oncology nurse just called to say not to come in this morning because the storm made their machine go bonkers.  No one knows why. Well, thank you very much, I do agree that I should not go anywhere near a death ray machine that is out-of-control. 

What should I do with myself today? Today is like a metaphor for my life right now, it stretches out in front of me, both long and short, gray, with no plan or purpose. I feel like a piece of dust floating in a beam not knowing whether to go up or down or left or right or how to or if to stand out or what I am, insignificant. And highly unadmirable. How can anyone admire someone who has lived through cancer and yet feels blah and doesn't feel like doing anything? Why am I not out jogging or getting fit or doing joyful yoga twice a day while drinking kale raspberry juice? Why am I not celebrating one more wonderful day of life when I didn't know just a while ago if I would be living? How have I failed this most basic of all human tests? See...this is the thing: I also "didn't know if I would be living" the day before I heard the word cancer and the week before that and 749 days ago and 22 years ago and yesterday and tomorrow and when I was 17 and 32 and 48 and in ten minutes and every 4th of July and most Wednesdays and during lunch meetings and while walking and weekends and on days because all of us none of us no one knows when we'll die or why. No one knows why. So this cancer experience while disgusting has not really changed me cuz I already knew things are iffy at best and the best things are free and here and now and that's ok. I'm just tired and, well, rather bored with this particular chapter.

No one knows why.

What I like is simply just to carry on with the fun girlitude of life and not revolve around the clogged rotten drain of screwy mutated cells. The kids acted in a play and played in an act and I drive and sing loudly with hilarious teens and this cures.

And we can always read poetry it's free

Spaces We Leave Empty

BY CATHY SONG

The jade slipped from my wrist   

with the smoothness of water   

leaving the mountains,

silk falling from a shoulder,

melon slices sliding across the tongue,   

the fish returning.

The bracelet worn since my first birthday   

cracked into thousand-year-old eggshells.   

The sound could be heard

ringing across the water

where my mother woke in her sleep crying thief.   

Her nightgown slapped in the wind   

as he howled clutching his hoard.

The cultured pearls.   

The bone flutes.

The peppermint disks of jade.

The clean hole

in the center, Heaven:   

the spaces we left empty.

 

Down and out

Been in a fog of pain for three days. It's my old foe: Pleurisy. Here's a description from the website called Healthline:

When you breathe, the tissues that line your lungs and chest wall, called the pleura, rub together. Normally this is not a problem, since the tissue is satiny and generates no friction. However, when this tissue is inflamed or infected, it becomes irritated and swollen. Its texture then becomes gritty, causing extreme pain. This condition is called pleurisy. 

Pleurisy has a grim fame of sorts, for it caused the death of a number of historical figures, including Catherine de Medici and Benjamin Franklin.

You know was idiopathic about having cancer? The thing is that each of us that has cancer, or any disease for that matter, is a unique individual, a set of 70 trillion atoms, a person, an entity, an organism. Unlike any other. A snowflake. We each come with our own unique set of circumstances, background, history, luggage and baggage, and shit. The stuff that makes us tick. We each tick tock at our own rate and with our own clocks.

So there are no hard and fast rules. 

For me, for some reason, when MY body or mind undergoes a lot of stress, its stupid annoying idiosyncratic counterintuitive non-brilliant DUMB reaction is to have pleurisy! It's ridiculous! What the hell!? How about just garden-variety over-eating of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream or something?

Wednesday I went around in pain, not able to take a deep breath, and with lasers shooting through me, worse  if I would sit down and much worse if I would lay down. Yesterday was the same, although I managed to get around during the day pretty normally. I hid it. Last night this act went to hell in a hand-basket at 1 o'clock in the morning and I was in out-of-control ouch-land and shaking and almost went to the emergency room but didn't want to leave my children alone at home. Hubby was biz tripping.

I hate having to drag around this stupid condition of pleurisy as a response to stress. Why? Because it doesn't make sense and it's a big chore to have to explain this to doctors who look at me and argue, "but this is not related to chemotherapy! This is not related to radiation! This is not related to heart surgery!" Or fill in the blank, whatever stressful thing I'm undergoing the time, "it's just not related!" I am a curious freak. I'm sure that I must be annoying in this way, and that they would like to simply bat me away. I would like to bat me away too, but my body says homie don't play that.

I know my freak pleural pain is not BECAUSE of radiation. I am not trying to argue that. I just want to know what should I do? Should I go see my general practitioner or show up at the emergency room or just scrounge around in my cupboard for old Vicodins and oxy pain meds from when my dad was around and take a bunch of them? That's what I did last night and it worked pretty well, but it's really not that great for carpooling and such. 

This morning from my general's test (bed) I put Fifi in charge of getting the kids ready, and they did, and they got a ride to school with a neighbor, thank God.

I slept till 9:30, threw on some slippers and drove to my 10 am radiation, luckily positioned a mile away. I was mostly clearheaded by that point but in a lot of pain, since the pain meds had worn off a few hours earlier. I looked particularly attractive too I'm so sure.

While there, a nurse, Allison, was kind enough to say hey why don't you stay here while I see if I can find a doctor to talk to you? She saved my day. Yes please. I met with a wonderful doctor at Austin Cancer Centers that I had never met before. He walked in and he was happy and jolly and kind of old-fashioned and retro. It turns out his old stomping ground is Tarrytown, and he used to hang out in Tarrytown Pharmacy were Mike was the manager for many years. He knows my husband, and my husband knows him and his wife. It's a small world. Cue the song. He hooked me up with some super strong pain medication and a short course of steroids, very very short, not enough to mess me up too much. I am now home resting, I have slept through a rock concert and four teenagers screaming and running around all day, but I feel much better. I waited to take the strong medicine until I had safely driven the kids home.

I'm riding this out.

You never know. You never know. You never know what's going to happen and who is going to help you. You just never know.

7 radiations down

13 to go

Rest stop

I feel truly bizarre. Vibrating and displaced disconnected otherworldly. I know that my feeling is a result of dragging along my suitcases of emotional cement, my cancer cement blocks of wet sponges of suck. 

I want to report to you. This is just a report from inside the office of an actual real-life cancer patient. Doesn't mean my experience will be the same as anyone else's, but I think it is important to tell what happens to a person when they do this thing called cancer, America, 21st-century.

I'm at the stage of radiation right now. I just started radiation a few days ago.

PAIN

Today I awoke at 2 am in searing recognizable pain - my left shoulder throbbing with a hot poker with every breath, every very shallow breath. I began to sip air like a turtle - willing the oxygen molecules to float down my throat rather than have to inhale them because the inhalations were stabbing me. 

I know this pain, I first met it in 1996. It is called idiopathic pleurisy. (Because I'm an idiot and pathetic, just kidding). If you see the word "idiopathic" on some kind of medical document about you, or hear it, here's what it really means: we don't know

For some reason, my body does this damn pleurisy dance to me when I am under extreme stress, like the stress I was under after open heart surgery in 1996. Or right now. Something in the pleural lining - which is some kind of weird sack encasement (like sausage casing?) thing that goes around your lungs -- gets hurt or inflamed or scratched or rubs something inside in a horrible way. Like rubbing two open wounds together - as your lungs expand with each breathe the outside of the lungs where the problem is, rubs the inside of the pleural lining where its problem is, and it causes excruciating pain. 

I've been to millions of doctors about this and learned a lot about it, although it's still very mysterious.  NO ONE KNOWS why the insides of some people's pleural linings decide to get sticky and ouchy and bloody and scabby and searing. And the pain is relentless, unless you can figure out a way of living that does not involve breathing. 

Imagine way down in the depths of the inside of your goopy gooey lungs and heart and encasements and sacs and fascia and mucus and membranes some nerves are on fire. The odd thing is you don't feel the pain way down in there, because this kind of pain causes what's called "referred pain" meaning that the long nerve that is so pained sends its pain signal somewhere else at the other end of its longness. For me this is in the left shoulder. When this freakshow first hit me a few weeks after open heart surgery in January of 1996, I woke up one unholy 3am into amazing, bright white, and literally awesome pain. Many ER trips, much useless discussion until a doctor finally figured out that it was pain from the pleural lining and put me on steroids, which took the pain away in 30 minutes. 

In other words extreme reduction of inflammation helps this thing more than pain medication. Nothing is more efficient at reducing inflammation at the speed of light than prednisone. It's like magic. But it's nasty evil stuff too. It will make you feel all jacked up, you can't sleep and you feel like you're a drug addict. Over time steroids can cause things like weight gain, winning the Tour de France, a round face, and, oh, perhaps a little psychosis!? I was on and off prednisone all the time that year. Then they put me on naproxen for two years, which you can now buy at the store under the name brand name Aleve, an NSAID - like ibuprofen. After a couple of years I weaned myself off of all that junk to wing it.

Since then this pleurisy pain stabbing murder thing happens to me just every once in a while, seemingly out of the blue. But...I know my body. When I'm completely freaked out with stress on the inside, even if it doesn't show on the outside, this pleurisy thing comes back. It came back last night it at two a.m.

I wonder if this pain, my personal custom made stab, is a way for my body to force me to stop. Like the pain of childbirth, when it hits you may not continue doing what you're doing even if you want to. Right now I'm laying in bed, taking Advil where I have been pretty much since 2 o'clock in the morning last night, except to get a ride to radiation, get radiated come and come back home. Okay! I hear you. I'm resting.

Too much. Too much right now. Too much muchness. Husbands who are in Vancouver British Columbia or Miami or Denver or Oklahoma City, kids who are in homework detention or practicing for a play till evening hours, mulch that needs to be spread, lunches and breakfasts that need to be made and delivered and packed and uneaten and rot in a lunch box or a car and no one cares. Mounds of wet towels wet towels wet towels, how in the world can we have 43 white wet towels in one bathroom or on a floor? I call a moratorium on towels. Each person gets one small towel. Or forget that, no one will listen to my towel philosophizing. Nor should they.

RADIATION

Today I had my fifth radiation treatment. This means I'm 25% of the way done. I now have the drill down pat, in terms of undressing, putting on my pristine pillowcase, and laying on my table. I have no had more time to contemplate the actual radiation, and instead of getting more used to it, I am getting more fearful of it. As robotic arms move above me, they scare me. The face of the radiator seems to be looking down at me in a menacing way. 

It descends upon me. Sees me. It (she?) clicks and whirs and groans and moans as it goes around and over me and sets like a setting sun to my left, about 20° below my body in preparation to shoot upward at that angle through my breast. Then, it pauses, ready to shoot. I try to breathe. Eyes closed. And wait.

I hear a click and a loud buzzing noise starts. I close my eyes and count out the seconds. It is 27 seconds. Not very long, but the seconds are very slow. The machine then clicks loudly and goes blank. Cold. Martian. Obsidian.

After a pause, the blank black glass faced machine awakens again. It jerks up from the left and crosses my horizon, moving over my body planet from left to right, crossing over me, right over my face, to position itself at the exact opposite side of my breast - now on the right side of my body. At about 2 o'clock straight up and to the right, it stops. The middle teeth are open in their blank upside down mouth shape. They are ready to shoot the radiation beams through the same breast from the opposite side. Run through all the tunnels backwards. This side - 21 seconds. .

During these two blasts, radiation beams go through me like the Road Runner's painted on mountain tunnels. Only the beams are made of light rays, x-rays, and travel even faster than the Road Runner. And there are an infinite number of them, making millions and millions of teeny tiny tunnels through me. From floor to top. Every cell is radiated. (And thus inflamed and sore). This is called full breast radiation. It fizzes.

That's my prescription.

In the interlude these two radiation blasts, one from the left, and one from the right, as the machine is moving over me in its trajectory across my horizon, I wonder, what if? What if the machine went crazy and started radiating straight down at me, here halfway, shooting X-rays right into my brain and killing me? Does it have an intelligence? A will? What if it one of the technicians behind the fort knoxian two foot door becomes a psychopath and pushes a button to commence radiating death right down into my heart and my chest and my neck and my lungs and I caught on fire and exploded? 

Or, what about the suicide wish that we all have deep inside of us? The desire to pierce the veil? When the radiation is on, I have a desire to sit up or move my head right in the way of the beams and kill myself. I have to concentrate on staying still. This isn't a very strong desire, it's more of a curiosity and the natural death wish that we all share, like when you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon. A mystery.

REST

I'm completely wiped out today. I was awake from 2 AM on. I don't feel good today. They assure me that the radiation is not the cause of my pleurisy or my tiredness. It's just me.

IT IS OK

Some very good things too:
My aunt is getting better after a spell of not feeling so well herself. At 90 she's an inspiration. Hello Aunt Marilyn!

Books - reading and reading my way through life. And my two book clubs. One group came for dinner last night and we shrieked with laughter while eating and yelling and drinking and arguing brilliantly with young funny girls waitressing about us in my dining room.

Friends - Susan P. popped by and visited me at radiation yesterday - impromptu radiant support.

Vi Fi n Mike n pals - my little hilarity reality show - we have mega fun and I love it. I love the beautiful mess of the anthropological creature called the American teenager - they are enchantingly hilarious. See photographic evidence.

Music - I can NOT GET ENOUGH of superbly loud radiating excellent music - these radiating waves do not hurt me or scare me they calm me and wake me and heal me.

My latest loves:

1. "Haunted" by Beyoncé 
It's what you do

It's what you see

I know if I'm haunting you

You must be haunting me

It's where we go

It's where we'll be

I know if I'm on to you, I'm on to you

On to you, you must be on to me

2. "Uncertainty" by Jagwar Ma 

I've got something pouring,
through a personal atlas,
and if the weather was warning,
even heaven should practice.

I've got something drawing,
like a column that's our own,
and if the weather was warning,
the stars are drifting the shallows.

How can ya', how can ya' look so gloomy,
When you're gloomy, howlin', look so good to me,
How can ya', how can ya' look so gloomy,
When you're gloomy, howlin', look so good to me.

Be my night,
be my night.

You take on everything,
in a peculiar manner,
and if I'd be so reckless

3. "Black Skinheads" by Kanye West 

For my theme song, my leather black jeans on

My by any means on, pardon I'm getting my scream on

Enter the kingdom but watch who you bring home

They see a black man with a white woman at the top floor they gone come to kill King Kong

I AM OK

WILL BE OK

GETTING THROUGH IT

Some pix from my week:

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

Moving through the experience

I'm moving through the experience of being a patient. Or the experience is moving through me - of learning how to be patient. Not learning just how to be A patient, as in "a human being who has to go to doctors and do stuff that the doctors say," but, rather, I am learning the essence of patience. I am having to learn this whether I like it or not, because the nature of what's happening to me has been so very out-of-control and so very slow.

Somehow or somewhere or someone has goofed up my plans for radiation. Someone has planned my radiation of goof ups. Some goof has upped my radiation for plans. Somewhere has plans for my goofing up been radiated. Things got a bit fucked up in the planning department. Yet. It will be ok.

Still, I have not been summoned to a table to have radiation shot through  my breast. Phone calls have been made, emails have been sent, phone calls have been received, mistakes have been made, notes have been unread. For reasons unknown, my doctors have not communicated with each other enough, and my case started to fall through the cracks. No one was calling to set up radiation. I have cranked the show back up and I'm about to go onstage soon now, I think. Everyone around me is angry about this, but I don't see much use in the anger, and I am patient.

I've been lingering in the hallway of my cancerous season. I've been waiting. I've been attending free yoga classes for breast cancer patients given by very kind and amazingly calm woman. She wears long white flowing shirts, and loose pants. Around her neck is a beautiful long necklace that sways down to her stomach with a long bright red fringe at the end. It is made of beautiful red beads with blue and yellow beads also. It is reminiscent of a catholic rosary in its weight and swing.

The class is kundalini yoga, which is very different from any yoga I've ever dabbled in, and dabble is a bit of an exaggeration. It is not the yoga of fierce fashiony stretchy sexy warrior poses featured in Athleta catalogs where thin coltish blond beautiful women in bikinis stand pretzeled and backwards curled on beaches in Hawaii. 

The word kundalini means awareness, and this form of yoga focuses on energy, awareness, and mantras that awaken your own inner strength and energy. At least that's what they say. It involves the breath and something called breath of fire, which is akin to snorting in and out as loudly as you can, like a serious pig. Of course the eighth grader in me finds this funny, but then the gravitas of who is in the room tamps that right back down.

Each set of poses or sequence is called a kriya. In one kriya today we sat with legs crossed and then reached forward with our arms and grabbed at the air rather violently. We were instructed to open our hands as widely as we could, fingers splayed,  and to fiercely grab prana (I think this is some sort of positive energy of the universe or something) and then jerk our arms backwards into our chests as quickly as we could to bring it in to our selves. To do this while sticking out our tongues and yelling out a painful groan as loudly as we could -on the exhale. To do this over and over again frenetically, yet calmly. Lamaze-like. We were moaning outward, sort of like screaming out the grief of cancer. With tongues out like Maori warriors. If you think this sounds very strange and awkward you are right. However it was also very calm and normal. A bunch of grown ordinary seeming women and a few suburbany men sprinkled in did this quietly but loudly, calmly but violently. There are no pretensions at all in this yoga class. The woman next to me was wearing khaki Capri pants and a regular black nice work shirt, and in fact, she was going right back to her job after this class. People wear jeans or maybe even a business suit. You could, no kidding, wear pantyhose and a skirt in there and no one would give it a second thought. No one cares anything at all about yoga culture in this class. 

If at any time during the class you don't feel up to doing the particular kriya that is going down at that time, many of which are not very strenuous as most of them are done sitting down, you're invited, in fact invited politely and encouraged, to simply lay down or stand still or sit. It would be perfectly fine for me to go to class one day and say, "I don't feel very well, I'm going to lay here on my mat in the middle of the room on my back with a Mexican blanket over my body, and my head on the pillow, and just watch the class from the ground." Or, I wouldn't even have to say it, I could just dream it, and the other people could understand my dream through the air.  Everyone would smile solemnly at me and say "yes, that is good, we are glad you are here." Or, they would dream it back to me, beam it back to me. The class is free and open to our special club, and it meets forever, every Wednesday from here until eternity.

When I went to the first class about a month ago, a very friendly woman named Cristina, smiled to me after class and we talked of juice. At the second class she brought me a beautiful glass bottle with a rubber stopper full of a special juice she had made just for me with apples and ginger and kale and spinach and broccoli. She also gave me xeroxes of the covers of some of the best books that she has read about cancer, and a recipe for the juice she was giving me. She pressed these into my hands with a warm smile and said "Yes, yes, yes! Drink this! You keep the bottle! It's for you!" I drank it up straight in the car. It was crisp, green, and 1000 times better than anything at Whole Foods or Juiceland. 

I'm moving through this experience, this crowd of women, The wall of surgery, the curtain of radiation which I have yet to pass through. The chemicals are still moving through my body from chemotherapy. These mornings when I wake up I can barely walk, I feel like my joints are made out of rubber that is then pumped full of liquid cement. My skeleton hurts. My knees and hips hurt, my hands hurt. Stairs feel bad. I don't know if I'm getting arthritis, or if chemotherapy has affected my joints somehow. Again, I cannot get a clear answer on this. It could just be coincidental timing, it's just yet another thing that I don't know. Hobble hobble, rock, rock rock, rock. I rock back-and-forth in my walk, my gait is stiff, but it sort of works out after I walk around for a while. 

Right now I'm killing time 

Or living life?

I don't know where I'll be tomorrow.

That reminds me of Journey.