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Saturday, September 6, 2014

Step Three

If I've been quiet here, it is because I'm just beginning to raise my head up out of the foxhole. Okay, not a great metaphor, because there has been no hiding from enemy fire. A better metaphor would be getting off a merry-go-round, those metal ones ubiquitous in playgrounds before people worried so much about children's ability to play safely. Kids would load on, someone would spin it by holding the bar and running fast right next to it, and then jump on. The world would blur by if you looked out, familiar but lacking essential detail. Gradually, it would slow down, and you would climb off, reeling and tipsy, centrifugally altered, but still in the same place.

Going through two surgeries and six rounds of chemo in seven months required my hanging on through a swirl, looking out at a sometimes blurred world going by, dizzy, often nauseated and disoriented, precisely at a time when thinking clearly would probably be a good idea.  Then the chemo ends, things stop swirling so fast, and smelling weird, and the hair starts growing back, altered, but still on my head.

So now that I'm done swirling, landed in the same place, I have possibly too much time to reflect on what the hell just happened. Getting from one appointment to the next was in many ways easier. I used to love Jed Bartlet in West Wing when he'd say to staff, "What's next?" but I console myself now that I don't have to answer anything except "radiation," the Step Three after surgery and chemo.

Radiation offers those bizarre moments unique to breast cancer treatment.  I am having a new form of super high-tech radiation, with a Star Trek-like machine, and in case you think I'm exaggerating, it is called the VARIAN TrueBeam High Energy Linear Accelerator (THELA). I have a team of three highly trained technicians who make this thing work with admirable precision, including playing jazz on Pandora while I'm on the table. Mandy is an artist of alignment, and her two handsome assistants tug and shove me to her requests like "left hip 3cm right" with fervent devotion.

But the first day was slightly intimidating, and I walked into the vast room with the plutonium-powered DeLorean THELA machine with no idea what happens next. I looked up at a monitor next to the machine and saw large photos, including a side angle shot of my left breast, trussed up in the plastic and velcro thing they fitted me with for these treatments. My face must have done something because Mandy said consolingly, "That is just so we know we have the right treatment location. Probably not what you expected to see this early in the morning."  I answered, "Well, as long as you don't leak it on the internet with Jennifer Lawrence's naked photos..."  There was a second of silence, and then three loud guffaws. From that moment, I figured it would be fine.