The gurney was hard, and I’d been holding still for fifteen long minutes. Tears pooled in my ears, and my nose itched. I took a breath deeper than I would have thought possible. “That’s great.” The technician’s voice crackled through the intercom. “Now hold it.”
A lens like an oversized alien eye whirred around me on its long blue arm. Clanking into position, it shot a beam into my breast. My held breath put a cushion of air between the target — my tumor — and nearby sites of possible collateral damage, like my heart.
Above me, in place of some of the ceiling tiles, clouds gleamed white in a deep blue sky. The clouds were my abacus as I counted the seconds until I could breathe again. I rounded thirty, and then, feeling as if I would burst, sailed past forty. Finally the intercom clicked. “You can breathe now.”
I hadn’t really exhaled since the diagnosis two months back, a curse delivered in a medical monotone: Infiltrating (aka invasive) Ductal Carcinoma, caught early but reproducing at a steady clip. My husband and I looked at each other, tumbling into each other’s fear as if into twin bottomless wells. I saw him seeing death blooming inside of me. “I’m still me,” I assured him, though I don’t think either of us believed that.
I held my breath through endless appointments, late-night research, surgery, and now, nineteen sessions of cloud study while a laser had its way with my left breast.
*
I could tell it was her first day. The middle aged woman with a bowl haircut hadn’t yet figured out the trick of wearing not one but two hospital gowns. Flapping the tails of my own pale blue ensemble, I demonstrated: wear the first gown with the gap in the back, then put on the second, robe-style, to cover that gap, keeping out cold air and rude stares. A relieved smile transformed her drawn face.
Unlike surgery or one-on-one appointments, radiation was a social experience. Women and men of all ages and races shared the waiting room at California Pacific’s Rad Onc (Radiation Oncology). Some kept their eyes on the floor or their phones; others looked around, seeking contact. I learned from the son of a man who had prostate cancer about another type of test you could take to learn about your tumor’s genetic profile. A woman in her late thirties, who’d had a breast cancer recurrence after a double mastectomy, told me she was taking chrysanthemum for the inflammation (radiation is nothing if not inflammatory). Once, a tiny, exquisite woman cried quietly and steadily into her magazine. I waited for her to look up, but she never did.
As I waited for the elevator one day, a tall man with anxious eyes, his wife in tow, asked me, “Staff?”
I shook my head.
“Where’s your cancer?”
“Left breast. You?”
“Throat.” He made a gesture as if to choke himself.
His wife looked embarrassed, but he and I weren’t. Cancer means you cut to the chase: Where is it? How are you doing? What path through the thorns and quicksand have you chosen?
To celebrate my last radiation treatment, my husband and I burned one of my gurney gowns in a fire pit at Ocean Beach. It felt good to mark the milestone with a ritual of my own making. Being a patient means you have very little control. The gown went up fast, sending quarter-sized embers into the wind. One landed on my hand; I brushed it off before it could burn me too badly.
*
Two years later, there are ways in which I’m still holding my breath. Long-term meds wreak havoc with my body, and I will always be on the lookout for the cancer coming back.
I remember a retreat where I went to regroup and play at monkhood. I figured I’d take some time to myself, soak in the hot springs, ponder death and dying. But humans can’t bear too much heaviness for too long — our bodies and spirits rebel. Sitting cross-legged on a hard cushion, I found myself unaccountably giddy. Hilarity bubbled up inside of me, threatening to spill out into the silence of the meditation hall.
In the book Fire Monks, about a fire racing to engulf Tassajara, the oldest Zen Buddhist monastery in the US, a monk who fought the fire says, “The Tassajara that was before the fire is not here anymore.” When asked what was there now, the man smiled. “Tassajara.”
It’s the same with me: pre-diagnosis me is gone. What’s left? Me. Just like before, but different, my relationship to the world subtly but irrevocably realigned. Feeling oddly weightless. Floating far above the clouds of Rad Onc.
You might also be interested in Why it took me two years to come out of the cancer closet.
The Clouds of Rad Onc
Just Another Cancer Post